


Foxhole Feet

by OrionLady



Series: In the Foxhole [1]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Aftermath of 10.22, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Closure, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Families of Choice, Featuring Smarties (the good kind), Finding Peace, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Loss of Trust, More like what I imagine would genuinely happen, NCIS: Los Angeles characters (mentioned), Nothing explicit but I bumped the rating up anyway, Platonic Relationships, Protectiveness, Reconciliation, Sleepwalking, Suicidal Themes, and tween movies (the good-bad kind), as a consequence of Steve's choice, not really a fix it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24003343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrionLady/pseuds/OrionLady
Summary: Steve says he’s happy on his globe trotting soul search and therefore so is Danny. End of story. If he repeats it to himself enough times during the day, it’s almost the same as feeling it. So what if he sleepwalks close to jagged cliffs or on balcony railings? So what if he’s missing a limb? Nobody has to know, least of all Steve.Danny has it all under control—he’shandlingit.(Right up until he can’t.)
Relationships: Steve McGarrett & Danny "Danno" Williams
Series: In the Foxhole [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1887817
Comments: 169
Kudos: 211





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> After many hours of listening to people debrief about the finale, a realization slowly began to dawn. The one thing every single person I've talked to has in common is their dismay not over who ended up with who or Steve leaving to seek peace, because of course he deserves that—it was that Steve left _one flippity flapping week_ after Danny almost died. The _way_ Steve left seemed uncompassionate, at a basic human level, and out of character. 
> 
> That being said, I actually really like and respect what the creators managed to do with the finale on such short notice. Everything leading up to that last minute was a thank you note to fans for loving these characters so much. 
> 
> (I'm slowly crawling my way through rewatching the show and so if I get any niche details wrong, my sincere apologies! It also feels absurdly satisfying that this 5-0 piece is my 50th posted fic. It's the little things.) :)
> 
> This is my version of how they _both_ might find healing and closure. Bon apetit!

‘I am not yours, not lost in you,  
Although I long to be  
Lost as a candle lit at noon,  
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.’

“I Am Not Yours” ~ Z. Randall Stroupe, poem by Sara Teasdale

Teleportation is, scientifically, a real theorem.

There’s a formula for it and everything, but the catch is that human beings can’t travel at the speed of light like a fiber optic cable and even if they could, it would probably end with said human a splatter of atoms on the pavement. Many people aren’t aware of that fact—neither was Danny for that matter, until he Googled it the first day after he did it—and those who know aren’t holding their breath for it anytime soon. The world is stuck with airplanes for now.

Danny finds himself less and less sure of that last part.

Three days after Steve left, Danny closes his eyes on the couch—he refuses to sleep in the empty bed upstairs, thank you very much, however much the team teases him. Not to mention that climbing the stairs more than once a day to shower is Herculean at the moment—and _poof_.

Like a magic trick, when he opens his eyes: he’s sitting on the bottom stair.

Danny blinks. He wonders if he got up to pee earlier in the night and used the upstairs bathroom by accident instead of the one down here, slumping asleep on the staircase.

But somehow…whether it’s true or not, Danny can only sit there and marvel at the sun coming up after this singular sleight of hand.

Sunrise begins on the eastern side of the house, of course. The implications of this have never been as pronounced as they are in this moment, rays touching the potted plant in the McGarrett living room, just a tickle at the leaves. The way light arcs around the kitchen door jamb means it refracts along the bannister before the first step.

There’s cotton in his mouth, his cane at a crooked angle next to him that perfectly matches the jangle in his breathing. He’s not quite awake yet and neither are his eyes in the face of this much sunlight. It turns the world black and white for a moment, tinged with the sepia tones of summer days.

It’s peaceful, totally silent. Even Eddie is absent, probably still sprawled on Steve’s bed where he’s parked himself every night since…since…

Danny blinks some more.

A door opens.

The sticky clop of bare feet on hardwood approaches, the sound more pronounced since the day already promises to be a hot one. A quiet sigh punctuates the feet. Then the footsteps stop and it is silent once more, though, ironically, Danny’s breathing is the least detectable of the two.

“Are you okay, sir?”

There’s no clock handy in sight, but Danny knows it’s too early to care about correcting the title. It’s so early that he doesn’t feel the usual buffet of pain yet either, not totally back in his own skin. He might even be dreaming. A much more plausible possibility than teleporting and atoms splashed all over the floor like a macabre Jackson Pollock painting.

“Yeah, Junior.” Danny’s voice comes out with the grace of an asthmatic after a run, all breath. He hums to clear his throat and wipes a gritty hand down his equally gritty eyes. His voice is stronger the second time. “Just…watching the sunrise.”

This, at least, is not technically a lie. Unusual, sure. But in the same realm of unique human experience that has no place for fantasies like magically appearing in a new spot from where you started. He really is fascinated by the way sunlight is now creeping up his foot, across the knee of his sweatpants.

“Gotcha. You need your meds?”

Danny finds that closing his eyes somehow only serves to jolt him further awake. “That’s okay. I’ll get ‘em in a minute.”

“Alright. Call if you need anything.”

Then the sticky steps retreat, faster than they normally would and not taking advantage of the early morning hour to go for a run, proof enough that Steve’s sudden absence is taking its toll on all of them. ‘Hovering’ is a modest term for the team’s refusal to leave Danny to his thoughts at any time, whenever possible.

So the easy victory takes a moment to sink in, that Danny is truly alone for the first time in days.

He wants to move, either to go back to bed on the couch or at least make his morning coffee, but his body is calcified to the stairs. He’s becoming a sculpture of wood himself, hollowed out and eaten by the insects of loss. It wouldn’t surprise him if he grows old on this spot, sitting to watch thousands of suns rise and fall like silent empires.

Danny isn’t sure why it happens, this rigidity in his limbs. It isn’t pain or stiffness or fatigue or light-headedness. He just can’t _move._ At the very least, leaning against the bannister to take pressure off his back would be fantastic.

Danny doesn’t move.

He’s hardly blinking now and in the space of one heartbeat to the next, the world is back to black and white. Junior’s presence was a momentary reprieve from it, but it filters back in before he can argue the sensation away.

_Click, click, click, click, ther-clunk, ther-clunk—_

Eddie bobs down the stairs to sit beside his human with a _woof_ that is felt instead of heard. It’s the morning ablution greeting standard for this dog, though there’s a tilt along his ears, indicating that he feels the difference in the house’s usual rhythm too. Danny can’t even lift a hand to pet him.

“‘M stuck,” he breathes, heart pounding.

Eddie _woofs_ again in reply, louder, while licking at his face. And suddenly Danny is human again.

* * *

In hindsight, popping back horse-sized pain killers and anti-inflammatory medication while standing in a public place, right there in front of a grizzled corner store owner, is probably not the best move. The fact that his other hand is shaky on a cane does not help.

Danny realizes this somewhere in between bringing the bottle of orange juice to his lips, to wash the pills down, and the owner’s sky high brows. Wiping his mouth, Danny sets the juice on the counter and fishes for his wallet.

The man doesn’t say anything right away, just continues ringing in the juice, milk, butter, bread, eggs, and those dark chocolate nougat bars Danny loves so much. A guilty pleasure secret reminiscent of his Jersey days that is somehow also sold in Hawaii. This is the only place on the island that sells them, and he likes to stock up while he can.

“Hey, man.” The owner finally speaks up, a decision Danny saw coming miles away. He might be doped up and a little slow, reaction speed wise, but he can still dissect facial expressions down to the bone. “You didn’t drive here, did you? Can I call you a cab?”

Danny shakes his head. “Walked.”

“You _walked_ all the way?” The man is still in the incredulous phase of this conversation. “We’re near the business district, not close to any housing. How far?”

“Oh!” Danny ignores this question when he spots several packs of Nestle Smarties on the bottom shelf. “Hang on, I’ll take a couple of these too. My partner eats this crap up, since it’s imported candy. He used to buy them while overseas and it reminds him of…”

Having just praised his own ability to read a room, Danny is electrocuted down the buttons of his spine with shock at how long it takes him to realize his slip up. He’s already handed over enough bills to cover the total and started gathering his grocery bags before the reality of the empty house he’s about to stumble back to hits him afresh.

In sucker punch contrast, the man lights up. He even smiles. “That’s nice of you! I wish my friends were thoughtful like that—little things mean more sometimes, you know?”

Danny slowly, coin by coin, picks up his change. He keeps his eyes on the counter top. “Yes. Yes, they do.”

The Smarties clatter in the bag, colourful packaging and all, and Danny puts his hand on it to stop the sound. He ends up hooking both bags over the handle of his cane and wrist when he feels how much heavier they are than expected. Maybe he should’ve taken Quinn up on her offer to do his shopping.

“Have a good one!”

Danny waves while hobbling out the door. “Yeah, you too.”

Walking home, over four miles, is insurmountable. Danny doesn’t even bother, muscles already locking up from the exertion. His doctor told him to walk a little bit each day to maintain mobility but this is pushing it, a red flag even in his eyes.

He ends up at a tourist-y little park, overlooking the water. Plopped on a massive boulder that digs into his tailbone.

It’s there that Tani eventually finds him, taking a break from whatever case the team is currently working on. She, out of the whole team, doesn’t treat him like a mopey china doll. It’s jarring and refreshing and he’s not sure he’ll ever find a way to thank her enough. 

Case in point, her first words out the car window when she pulls up are—“Need a ride, loser?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Danny stands, with a tiny grin that’s almost real. It’s the trying that counts, and right now trying is an expensive endeavour.

“Went out for a milk run and got stuck, huh?”

Danny lowers himself into the passenger’s seat of her car and shivers a little in the abrupt AC. She waits for him to get his cane and the bags at his feet sorted before pulling back onto the road.

He takes in a measured breath. “Mocking injured people is considered impolite.”

“Who’s to say you’re not just old?”

“I take it back. A _cop_ mocking injured people is criminal. I’m walking home.”

Tani laughs, breaking the moment. “No, no. We can’t have you collapsing on the side of the road and making the five o’clock news. It would upset Junes too much.”

“Oh, Junior? It would upset just him?”

“You know how sensitive he gets.” Tani deflects this blatant fondness and concern by taking another sip of the travel mug in her free hand. “He says you haven’t been sleeping well. By which I mean you either don’t sleep at all or you don’t get up until noon.”

Danny makes a note to brush up on Junior’s observational skills, because this is not quite correct. He sleeps so deeply that he has no room for dreams, more in the realm of unconsciousness than actual REM sleep. While it’s nice to have no nightmares—for now—something about the polyester batting of _nothingness_ , stuffed in tight tumbleweeds against the walls of his brain, is far more aching.

He aches like his whole body is set on ice. Soft, soft ice without end.

“Danny? You with me?”

“Hmm?” Danny rouses from the foggy episode and is relieved that he’s not alone for this one. They take a turn and the bags rustle. “Hey, do you want some Smarties?”

Tani’s lips purse but she doesn’t push her line of questioning. “Those sugar circles that come in a roll?”

“No, the rainbow ones. With chocolate in the center.”

“Oh.” Tani laughs again. “That weird candy from Canada that Steve likes?”

Danny points at her.

“Sure. I’ll bite.” Tani shrugs but there’s a spark in her eyes while Danny pops open a box and pours some into her palm. She doesn’t eat them one by one, like a normal person. No, she eats them like Steve, throwing the whole litter into her mouth at once.

She crunches them around in her mouth for a second, then her eyes go wide. “These are amazing! Can I have the rest?”

And what do you know. Danny’s grin is actually real this time. “They’re all yours.”

* * *

“I’m just saying, brother to brother here, that sometimes you gotta leave the sand behind.” Lou turns from his grilling long enough to level one of those head dipped, eyes up looks. “You see what I’m getting at?”

Danny’s forehead wrinkles. He squints, pivoting his cane while he tilts back and forth in a thinking motion. “Are you telling me to leave Hawaii?”

“What? No!” Lou swipes his barbecue tongs in the air. “I don’t mean leave the island.”

“Then what do you mean?” Danny itches at his nose with the non-alcoholic beer bottle in his left hand.

The evening meal crowd is smaller than usual, just Lou, Quinn, and himself. Junior is off on a date with Tani and Adam has ‘plans.’ The relative lack of people, especially as Quinn is out on the lawn playing fetch with Eddie, allows Danny to feel both at ease and perplexed by this assertive conversation.

Which is apparently a critical enough conversation that it requires more attention than their supper deserves. Lou flips the grill off and huffs.

He leans on it with a strangely intent frown. “It’s an expression, Danny.”

“…An expression.” Danny squints some more.

“Like a metaphor. It means you need to leave the shore and take a dive into deeper waters.”

In another lifetime, under better, less Danny-got-shot-two-weeks-ago-and-can’t-be-left-on-his-own-with-tranquilizer-level-medication-in-his-system circumstances, it might just be the funniest interaction Danny’s ever had with Lou. It _is_ funny. Gruff, pushover Lou Grover is trying to use a swimming metaphor for God knows what. On Danny, of all people.

“Okay.” Danny runs with it because why not. “Are you telling me I need to take more responsibility with the task force? Step up now that Steve’s gone?”

Lou’s face scrunches into a face of such displeasure that he might as well be sucking the lemons currently sizzling on their overcooked salmon. “Work? This is not a Five-O discussion, Danny. I’m talking about leaving your comfort zone.”

Danny smiles, but this one is not very real at all. Gold star for pretending. “You’re trying out for a career change in motivational speaking, is that it? Trying to bolster my feelings?”

Lou doesn’t laugh or take the bait, which is just out of character enough that Danny stops shuffling. Something of this must show on his face, for Lou immediately drags over a patio chair and lowers Danny into it with a hand under his elbow. The considerate action leaves Danny struggling to catch his breath for reasons he can’t quite comprehend. Lou keeps a hand on his arm.

With Danny a crumpled piece of paper in the chair and Lou bent over him, the words filter in better this time—

“Danny…I’m saying you need to _leave the sand_. When was the last time you did something for yourself?”

“I went for a walk yesterday. Very refreshing.”

Lou makes another face. “That was a suicide mission disguised as a grocery run. Tani’s own words.”

Danny sighs.

“Danny.” Lou broadens his name into three syllables. In another lifetime, that might sound funny and patronizing too. But now it just burrows deeper into Danny’s sternum, though he stiffens his jaw to hide the effect. “Let me put it this way: why did Steve leave?”

“To heal,” Danny answers instantly, almost without thinking. “Lou, he did what was best and from the measly texts I get, he and Cath are having a great time. They both need that.”

He doesn’t _have_ to think. There is no bitterness in his spirit for Steve needing time to heal. He can’t begrudge what Steve needs, even if he tried. And he has. Profusely.

Lou’s eyes are sad. Danny is glad someone in this equation feels something—he certainly doesn’t.

“What if…work with me here…what if you deserve that same concession too? Time to heal, to do what you want instead of what everybody needs from you.”

Danny sits up. Lou is wrong, so very wrong. “I do what I want. Why do you think I moved here in the first place?”

There’s a lilt around Lou’s mouth that doesn’t match his surprised stare. “Danny, you moved here to follow your family. For Grace.”

Bad example.

“I’m taking time off work, maybe indefinitely. That’s something.”

“Because you got _shot_.”

Drat. Another bad example.

Lou seems to recognize that Danny is floundering and simply pats his arm. “Just…think about it, Danny. Please. After putting everybody first all the time, it’s the least you can do. You can’t stay along the shoreline forever and never explore what you—just you—want in life.”

Danny’s broken ribs protest his truncated and bull-like exhale after Lou turns back around. He’s irritated to find that he’s too shaken to even stand.

There. That’s an emotion.

And his anger is as old as the hills, a boxer’s swing of hurt and injustice that’s never fully healed, just been redirected into more useful decisions and disciplines. Can’t solve murders without some pent up rage to fuel the motivation.

Somehow though, Danny is the one on the ropes from a haymaker punch of regret.

What he _wants_ is the fog back.

* * *

The next time Danny teleports, he really _is_ stuck in sand.

It’s a good thing Junior decided to stay over with Tani because this would certainly cause the league of mother hens to lose their feathers. Danny has somehow materialized out the kitchen door, across the lanai, and onto the beach past their Adirondacks.

He’s not close enough for nippy sea foam to lap at his toes, but it’s still cold. No sunset this time, not this early, but the sky boasts a cobalt shade that will soon turn soupy with the clouds of an incoming morning storm. The wind reflects this, tearing at Danny’s sweats and T-shirt.

Just like last time, he’s planted firmly in place. Danny blinks, tears streaming from the crisp air blown directly at his eyes, and finds that the waves match his slow _thump…thump…thump_ pulse.

That aches too.

There’s something transcendent about it, as if he missed the apocalypse and is the only one left on Earth. If Danny breathes, the ocean does too. Pulled by the same moon and its gravity, released by the same wind.

That song bungled it up, Danny decides. None of it is true. It’s _him_ who’s had to bide while Steve went off.

And even if he was the Danny boy in that song, he certainly has not been sleeping in peace. In quiet maybe. Somehow magically waking up in a place he hasn’t been since saying goodbye to Steve last week. But not peace, never with such a cavernous space where life used to be. Maybe the doctors removed his heart after all.

Then the wind, in an enigmatic move, suddenly dies.

Danny keeps tasting salt between his teeth.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Danny?”
> 
> Body twitching, skittish, Danny raises his brows and turns from the coffee maker’s riveting production.
> 
> Junior works up enough nerve. “You’d tell us, wouldn’t you? If you weren’t…okay?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you're all staying well out there, friends.

‘I’ve been sleepwalking,  
Been wandering all night  
Trying to take what’s lost and broke  
And make it right.’

“Burning House” ~ Cam

To the team’s credit, nobody ever, _ever_ asks Danny, “Are you okay?”

Not once. Not even when Danny got too stiff in the beach chair after that horrible, horrible goodbye and Adam had to come help him stand up—all just so he could go inside and lay back down again.

Like right now, for instance. Here is Quinn, handing him a…mini bathtub?

“Uhh…” Danny juggles the bizarre Tupperware container in one hand and bag of rolls in the other. He’s lost the need for a cane after his latest doctor’s visit three days ago, mercifully. “What is this?”

“It’s a bathtub,” says Quinn. She’s clearly enjoying his confusion. Seeing his pale face, however, she shepherds him back inside. “I got it at a novelty restaurant when I had leftovers and now I use it for people who’ve got the whole wounded puppy chic going on. Like you.”

Danny side eyes her, then hums. “Thanks. This smells good. Rigatoni?”

“I cooked it myself.” Quinn beams. “Took me two tries—the first batch burned nearly black—but this one’s golden.”

A silken bubble wells in Danny’s chest. Numb as he feels these days, it takes longer than it should for him to identify the feeling as being touched. Somehow, that Quinn would attempt a recipe twice, an Italian and therefore probably unfamiliar one at that, just because he likes it, guts him clean through.

“Thank you,” he says again, heavier and sincere. “Junior’s been supervising the stove but his cooking is limited to eggs, toast, and sausage.”

Quinn winks. “Say no more. I’ve got you covered.”

Another day it is Adam at his door with a prescription he forgot to pick up. Lou comes by with books to keep Danny entertained. The latest one is a series about a playwright who learns to fish or something like that. Perfectly in keeping with this ocean metaphor he insists on dropping in Danny’s lap at unexpected times.

Junior’s way of showing his support is, basically, keeping Danny from tripping around the house. These are, by far, the strongest take-home pain killers he’s ever been on and sometimes he loses time, or depth perception takes a day off. He’s had more than one run in with a closed door that he thinks is farther away than it is. Showering is a tricky affair, mostly with Junior sitting outside on the floor until the faucet turns, after which Danny is granted the luxury of privacy.

And Tani, well. Tani throws Smarties at him and makes him re-watch her favourite tweenhood movie (it’s _Sleepover_ , and it’s burned on the back of Danny’s retinas for life) on nights when trying to sleep feels like Chinese water torture.

He’s appreciative, he is.

Danny is wise enough to know he wouldn’t be alive without them all. Especially as he’s about two inches away from a complete system shut down at any given time. Shock and grief are not new bedfellows, but the all encompassing, frozen state of his soul is.

It’s not even a dulling of emotion. It’s _nothing._ Someone has scraped off every single bright thing on Danny’s canvas and left it blank.

That Friday night, Tani has nodded off somewhere around the part where the main character skateboards in a ruby lounge singer dress and catches lover boy’s attention, and so it’s just Adam and Danny sitting on the couch, staring at the screen without seeing it.

“Pretty crazy, isn’t it?”

Danny livens at Adam’s voice, the first time either of them have spoken in over an hour. “Hmm? What’s crazy?”

Apparently one of them is still watching. Adam gestures at the screen—he’s heaven blessed by the fact that he’s only had to watch this movie once—with a snort. “The lengths people will go to when trying to feel ‘alive’ or like they’re making the most of life.”

“I’m still trying to process the fact that Steve Carrell plays a rent-a-cop.”

This earns him another pass of the popcorn bowl and a quiet chuckle, to avoid waking Tani. “Adventure is all a little bit over-rated.”

“Nah. It’s not.”

The answer startles even Danny, coming out of his mouth. Adam tries and fails not to blatantly stare at him, handful of popcorn halted halfway to his mouth.

Danny leans forward to explain, but what comes out instead is, “Even with Rachel it didn’t feel like this.”

Adam’s crossed ankles uncross very fast and then he sinks back into the cushions in a bid to relax. An excited gleam in his eye betrays his nonchalance.

“Talking about it helps. Trust me.” Adam cants his head in a knowing smile. “Sometimes it helps even more than a glass of cold water to the face.”

Danny runs a hand down his mouth. “Did I ever apologize for that?”

“No need—that day was a wake up call and it gave me purpose. You all saved my life, which is why it’s our turn, Danny. We’re here to make this easier.”

“I’m not the only one struggling,” Danny argues.

Adam concedes this with a nod and a glance at Tani. “No, but not even counting your physical wounds, you’ve lost the most, known him the longest.”

“He’s not dead and this isn’t a funeral.” Danny shakes his head, irritated. “He’ll come back.”

Adam leans closer, so their shoulders touch. His arm is a warm sun amidst the icy tundra of Danny’s soul. “Maybe that’s not the point. He’s been away before and he’s either come back or you’ve dragged him. It’s not his absence itself that’s hard…is it?”

Tani and Eddie snuffle in their respective sleeps, his paw hanging off her lap in the recliner. On screen, the girl climbs an old treehouse. Somewhere down their real life street a cat yowls.

Danny blinks too fast in the dark, lost in a snow laden coffin that he’s beginning to worry he built with his own hands years ago. His mouth works for a moment, searching searching _searching_ for the right words, the colours that he remembers but cannot describe.

“Adam?”

Adam’s voice lowers in volume to match Danny’s crystal-thin tone. “Yeah?”

“What if…” Danny closes his eyes. “What if people are like…like bank accounts? We invest all of who we are, even when friends and family tell us to be cautious.”

If there was ever any doubt, Danny really does not deserve these people. Adam doesn’t brush off this slightly incoherent question or suggest he go to bed or pester him about how many of those Percocets he took with dinner.

He is silent for a suspended minute. Then—“Like that saying, don’t put all your eggs in one basket?”

Danny opens his eyes, floored. “Yes. Exactly like that.”

Adam sinks even deeper into the couch cushions. The credits roll, blipping white flashes in the living room’s murk. Danny has most of these memorized too.

“While there’s merit in that wisdom, if the investment is in another person, it’s never wasted.”

Danny looks beyond the living room to the kitchen and the ironing board where it is tucked by the stove. He looks at that ironing board a lot, he’s discovered.

“You’re sure?” Danny hates how small he sounds.

“No.” Adam shrugs and the sun does a backflip. “You never can be— _that’s_ the point.”

Danny has the exact words he needs this time, but he can’t say them out loud.

 _I think I’m bankrupt_.

It feels like a cruel thing, even having the thought. Rachel and the divorce never felt like this, for at least that had been a mutual kind of falling apart, no matter what Danny said to his family and friends. Then again, no loss in Danny’s life has ever felt like the nuclear tragedy of two weeks ago. That simple moment. So quiet, so quantifiable.

Danny, abandoned and alone on a beach chair. And really, isn’t that the pending title of his autobiography?

* * *

_Progress!_

This is Danny’s first though upon waking. He opens his eyes and actually catches himself in the act of teleporting.

Only…oh no…this isn’t teleporting at all.

Danny shakes to awareness and feels his right foot push off while his left braces on the ground. His hands are already touching the corner of the kitchen countertop, cold and shaky. Rather than a gentle arrival, Danny has to lean on the counter or else his feet roll at wonky angles. It’s the only thing keeping his battered body upright.

And then, suddenly, someone is touching _him_.

For a split second of beautiful ignorance, Danny almost snaps, “ _Steve._ ”

But then the hand jostles him. “Sir? Sir! Danny!”

The sound of his first name is what wakes him fully.

“Get _off_ me,” he growls.

Danny wrestles himself away, trembling in earnest and blistered with anger. There’s no warning to the feeling, just that the peace of this strange, recurring experience has been shattered. The whole effect is almost too much, coupled with hollow echoes that won’t stop clanging in Danny’s chest.

It’s Junior standing there, of course, panting like he leapt the stairs two at a time. Hoodie hood pasted to his right shoulder from the force of movement. Eddie is hot on his heels and licks at Danny’s knees.

“Sir, what are you—”

Danny scrambles for a plausible excuse. “I’m making coffee.”

“It’s five in the morning.”

“So I’m making early bird coffee. What is _your_ problem?”

Junior narrows his eyes, obviously worried and thoroughly stumped. “I thought I heard you stumble into something.”

“Well…” Danny swallows. “It’s dark in here. Turn on a light, would you?”

Though Junior does, he refuses to leave Danny alone with the coffee maker. This forces Danny to actually make said coffee, even though the smell of it sends a lurch from one end of his stomach to the other. The two men stare at the machine, groggy and equally confused for two different reasons, each drip percolating into the carafe.

Danny knows he should apologize for shouting, and later he will, but right now he’s just so shaken by the presence of another person after one of these episodes that it’s all he can do to stay standing.

“Danny?”

Body twitching, skittish, Danny raises his brows and turns from the coffee maker’s riveting production.

Junior works up enough nerve. “You’d tell us, wouldn’t you? If you weren’t…okay?”

There is no plausible excuse for this one, no weaseling out of the question, spoken into the crack of dawn hush and this tense moment. The coffee maker dings but neither moves. Eddie sits on Danny’s feet and thumps his tail.

“Wouldn’t you already know that, seeing as you’ve all become my second shadow?”

Junior doesn’t buy the deflection, his hand back on Danny’s forearm. “Just don’t think that you have to keep it bottled up.”

Danny almost laughs because his ghost-like behaviour is borne of an absolute _lack_ of feeling, not an excess.

“I know,” he says, trying to stick to things that are true. He refuses to lie to the team, for their compassion is the only thing keeping him afloat.

A precursor to that apology, Danny graciously pours a cup for Junior with a dash of caramel cream, just how he likes it.

“Uh…Danny?”

“Hmm? Not enough milk in it for you?”

“No.” Junior sounds dazed. “Is that our ironing board out on the lawn?”

Danny finally turns from the machine and yup. There it is, broken and sprawled in all its glory, like it was hurled out the door.

Huh.

* * *

“I’m not going crazy,” Danny grumbles, since it’s just he and Eddie in the house for the morning.

Eddie is once again laying across Danny’s feet where he sits at the dining room table, fingers frozen over his laptop keyboard. He knows precisely what he has to search for and is too cowardly to do it.

“Piece of cake. Come on, Danny.”

Sufficiently psyched up, the blinking browser cursor stops looking so scary. He doesn’t even have to finish typing ‘waking up in a different spot’ before that magical word appears in the autofill options—

‘ _Somnambulance_.’

There’s a quick explanation of it, along with tips for not interrupting whatever motions a person is going through in their sleep. That can cause the person to become upset or violent. Exhibit A being the way he nearly socked Junior this morning.

Danny sits back, brow cinched. “Okay. Makes sense. Just a fancy word for sleeping walking, right? That’s not the end of the world.”

He peers down at Eddie only to see that the dog’s tail has stopped wagging.

Danny knocks on the table. “Yeah, I don’t like this either.”

Next, he searches for if the pain medication can cause sleepwalking. It _is_ pretty strong, and he's had more than one incident where his perception of events or timing got skewed. Over eight minutes of complicated medical jargon later, however, and Danny has to come to the conclusion that unless he’s the one in a million outlier science hasn’t catalogued yet, it doesn’t. Can’t blame the pills, then.

His cellphone sits beside the laptop and he picks it up, thumb hovering over the number for his doctor. Surely this is something they should know about, the risks of wandering at all hours of the night while his torso is still black and green with bruises, ribs still cracked, shoulder still massively inflamed. It's shocking enough that he hasn't fallen or done anything more self-damaging.

But after another heartbeat or two of indecision, Danny switches tac and hits his fourth speed dial contact. He scratches behind Eddie’s ears while the phone rings, fingers tight.

“ _Honey?_ ”

“Mom.” Danny smiles at Clara’s usual short tones. “How are you?”

“ _I’m fine, Daniel. Any reason you’re calling me in the middle of the day? Is everything alright?_ ”

“Guy can’t call up his mother just to check in?”

“ _Of course…though you rarely do._ ”

Fresh guilt, only just assuaged from pushing Junior away, surges back in. “I’ll have to make a new habit of it, then.”

“ _Mhmm._ ” There’s a bitten back laugh. “ _See that you do. So. What are you really calling about?_ ”

Danny figures, screw it. Time for Lou’s diving-in philosophy. “Mom, does anyone in our family have a history of sleepwalking?”

“ _Sleepwalking?_ ”

“Like…fumbling around without being actually awake.”

“… _You’ve never done that._ ”

Perceptive woman, also as usual.

“ _Not even once that I can remember_ ,” she goes on. “ _Though you would sometimes sit up while still asleep. Once your feet hit the floor, you’d wake up on the spot._ ”

Danny sighs. Not a childhood habit manifested to life under the strain of severe trauma, like he’d hoped. That, at least, would be something predictable and easier to deal with.

They chat about the weather in Hawaii for a while and he tells her the meds are working and he doesn’t even need the cane anymore. Something about his tone must sound clipped, or at least tired, for she doesn’t badger him for the truth like she usually does after injuries like this.

After hanging up, Eddie moves so his head is on Danny’s knee.

“What am I going to do, bud?”

Eddie slobbers and looks sad too.

What Danny is most definitely _not_ going to do is tell the team. Hell no. They’re already on eggshells at just Steve leaving and the stunted, old man way that Danny moves now to avoid pushing on injuries. He can’t fathom the response this would garner.

 _You’re fine. You’ll figure it out. Everything is fine_.

* * *

This hip new trend of Danny’s feet carrying him places while his mind is down for the count continues over the next week.

There’s not even a pattern to where he goes, which is just frustrating enough that Danny almost considers bailing and calling the doctor.

On Monday he opens his eyes to find himself lying out by the neighbour’s flowerbed, nose a foot away from where she dug up those flowers that triggered Eddie. He just blinks at fresh sod and peach tulips for a while, until the sun starts to come up.

Tuesday it’s the beach again, though he’s covered more distance this time and has to hurry back before Junior notices his absence.

Somehow Eddie never catches him leaving the house, and that alone is testament enough that Danny either reassures Eddie in his sleep or he’s stealthy enough not to get caught even by a dog’s ears. Or more likely, Eddie thinks this is normal behaviour, since all the places Danny has gone so far are ones he’d visit in daylight hours too.

Wednesday affords a much needed break, but that’s only because he can’t sleep and Tani changes up their movie watching ‘experience’ with a little _What a Girl Wants_. Maybe the sleepwalking signals a midlife crisis, he ponders, while watching Tani and Junior cozied up on the recliner, laughing at Colin Firth. It would make sense, since he can’t do anything like a normal person, including a midlife crisis. He’d thought the restaurant perfectly covered that checkpoint in his life but maybe not.

He ponders Steve a lot too, why his midlife crisis involved lots of running away.

On Thursday, fed up, Danny goes so far as to buy a mini pack of Legos and lay them out in front of the couch. A moat of pure foot pain.

“There,” Danny whispers while crawling under the covers. “Try to sleep through that, you bastard.”

Except, when he wakes, it’s to find that he has moved them all out of the way in his sleep and he’s standing at the foot of the driveway. He’s not fully awake when a passing kid on a bicycle waves, but he manages to wave back and pick up the newspaper, like that was his intention all along.

When he’s finally weaned off the medication, graduating to over the counter pain killers, he figures the spells will abate. He’s obviously just exhausted and his brain is trying to process this newest reminder of mortality.

Nope.

With two nights absent of incident, Danny falls asleep Sunday night almost immediately. He’s warm and safe under the blankets, the comforter that smells like bonfires and Steve and Eddie’s fur. Nothing can touch him under here, comforted by that childhood instinct that never fully abates. Even Junior is down for the count, the house quiet, dark, perfectly conducive to a good night's rest, one so desperately needed. 

Early Monday morning, Danny smells leather.

Not shoe leather, either. Keeping his eyes closed for a moment, still dreaming about a man walking in the distance, Danny feels his hands close around something firm and stitched. It hurts a bit, the press of something sharp also tucked under his right palm. He's not leaning against a pillow either, though his back is cushioned. A little stiffly, even by the couch's standards. 

Suddenly, Danny cannot stand the thought of opening his eyes. He doesn’t need them to know where he is.

Danny’s eyes slit, blinded even by the feeble half moon light, and sure enough…

He’s behind the wheel of his car, the replacement he bought last week. 

More than that, he’s clutching the wheel in a boa constrictor’s death grip and his keys are folded in his right hand. He’s…he has somehow _dug his keys out of the kitchen drawer_ and unlocked the driver’s side. All while dreaming away. 

Forget shaking. Danny’s hands are a blur where he snatches them off the wheel and tucks them around his chest. His whole body tremors, caught in a personal, single serving earthquake.

Eyes huge, whites of his eyes flashing, Danny’s hand flies to his mouth. He whimpers out a distressed sound that cuts off halfway through. He feels like a spooked horse, like this can’t possibly be happening. 

Danny tries to move and finds himself hyperventilating instead. He can only sit there and shake and moan and wonder how and why this tic went from weird to potentially life threatening.

It's a miracle he didn't go all the way and turn the ignition or put it in drive. Had he gone through with it, he’d probably be dead down the street somewhere by now.

And for all that, the only words that keep screaming on repeat through Danny’s head are the ones he sobs out in the cloister of his parked car—

“I…” He wheezes. “I never drive my own car. I _never_ drive my own car…”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is moonlight. And there is wind.
> 
> There are crashing waves and there is Danny Williams, laughing until he runs out of air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve finally makes an appearance! (sort of - I promise that for all the hurt I'm inflicting now, there will be comfort later on to make up for it.)

‘Well a soldier lay down on the hilltop  
Over there where it’s sunny and blue.  
All the troops have gone home  
And left him alone,  
Commanding a beautiful view.’

“Forever Light Will Shine” ~ Alan Doyle

When Danny’s phone rings, he’s immediately suspicious. The team never calls him these days, either because they’re already physically present or because they text him little updates throughout the day. Short of an emergency, they don’t call him at home anymore.

Pausing in drying dishes, he peeks at the caller ID. Purses his lips, deliberates on the merits of payback and whether or not he’s justified in being that petty. Then answers.

“Ye-es?”

“ _Danny?_ ”

“You know it’s me.” Okay, maybe a little petty.

Steve just laughs. “ _You never know—Junior might have picked up._ ”

“Oh please.” Danny waves his hands and the dishcloth for emphasis, even though Steve can’t see it. Just the sound of his voice thaws the edges of Danny’s chest. “He knows better than to answer my phone. Where are you calling from?”

“ _The Bay of Fundy. It’s beautiful, Danno, you’d love it._ ”

“The Bay of—” Danny nearly drops the cloth, he’s so stunned. “I don’t hear from you for three weeks and you break your monk’s vow of silence or whatever to call me from _Canada_?”

“ _Highest tides in the world. Got to eat some of Alma’s famous sticky buns and salt water taffy while watching whales coming over the Bay with their calves this morning._ ”

“That’s beautiful. I feel like I’m watching a circle of life tourist ad. I mean where _are_ you?”

Steve is silent for a beat longer than he should be if this bantering cadence is to continue in its false pretense of normality. This is usually his cue and Danny feels nothing so much like a stagehand, ready to throw a prop at Steve’s head to keep him going.

“ _Gracie called me, when you missed your weekly check in with her._ ”

Danny rubs the skin between his eyes, knowing he shouldn’t have let himself be so out of sorts by yesterday’s getting-behind-the-wheel-of-his-car-and-almost-dying thing to stop him from calling.

Seagulls screech in the background of Steve’s end. He’s _literally_ still at the Bay, probably sitting out on a rock, the hobo.

“She had an exam Monday. It was a mutual missed call, so take that.”

This is quickly transitioning from petty to puerile. Steve must be feeling extra magnanimous because he doesn’t call Danny out on the obvious brush off. Danny senses the wide open plains of the emotional ground they are still somehow delicately treading across and, after a quick mental gamble, decides to dig his heels in.

“How’s Catherine?”

It’s impossible to tell without being physically present, but Danny can hear the shrug in Steve’s tone. He’d bet his badge on it. “ _Cath left a week ago, Danny. Unlike me, she still has to go back to work._ ”

“Oh. Sorry, Steve.”

“ _It’s okay. We always knew that’s how it would have to be for now, temporarily. We agreed to reconnect on the island when I get back and take it from there._ ”

Danny does drop the dishcloth this time, a slow motion action that feels like it’s happening inside someone else’s body, someone else’s hands. The sight of it rumpling to the floor prickles at the back of Danny’s eyes.

“And when will that be?”

There’s a supple silence, punctuated by the distant crash of waves and the cheery sounds of a boardwalk folk band and Danny’s uneven breathing.

“ _I don’t want to give you a false answer, Danny—because I honestly don’t know. However long it takes to stop feeling like I’m gaping open and bleeding all over the place, I guess._ ”

“It can really keep a guy up at night,” Danny agrees, to empathize. He notices the mistake a beat after Steve does.

“ _Why would you be up at night?_ ” Steve’s tone sharpens. “ _You texted me that you’d lost the need for heavy duty meds and the cane. You having trouble sleeping?_ ”

“No, no.” Danny listens to Steve bark questions for another minute and then huffs. “ _No_ , Steven. I am sleeping just fine for the most part. Dreams are not always…nice. But I’m pretty consistent.”

_Yeah, and I’m walking half the property in the dead of night. Hand me a prize._

Danny, wisely, does not voice this to his best friend. Steve has enough to worry about and Danny doesn’t own enough currency to invest this tidbit anyway. He’s not sure he ever did.

“Hey, Steve?” Danny interrupts the rambling lecture about doctor’s orders to take it easy for the next two months, and he’s not ashamed this time of the wobbly way it sounds.

“ _I’m here, Danno._ ” 

Danny almost hangs up then. Almost throws his phone far, far across the lawn like the ironing board.

“Is it…” He runs a hand over this most recent bullet scar. The self hug has the added benefit of keeping him grounded. “Are you happy there? Figuring it out?”

Then the seagulls go quiet and the lonely clang of a buoy ricochets across the line instead. Danny’s heart takes a two second vacation, dual beats he’ll never get back.

Steve hums a thinking sound. “ _Yeah, Danny. I’m still shaky and restless. But there’s no agenda, no catastrophe knocking on my door in the morning. So yes, relative to all of that, I’m happy._ ”

“Good.” Danny nods. “Good, then so am I.”

* * *

The next morning, Danny wakes curled up on the dining room table, of all places. He’s not as lock-jointed as he expected to be with such an unyielding bed and he enjoys the moment of quiet, the ripple of sunlight over the wall. It dances with the strong winds this morning.

This time, Eddie has caught him since it’s almost time to get up anyway, standing on his hind legs so he can lick Danny’s face.

Danny scritches at the dog’s scruff. “Good morning to you too.”

* * *

Junior opens the door later that week only to see one Danny Williams tearing around the living room, sweating and panting.

He immediately drops what’s in his hands—taco take out bags—onto the floor so he can run and brace Danny by the arm. “Sit down, sir, or you’ll fall over.”

“I can’t. I can’t—I—” Danny flails a hand. His injured arm is tucked close to his equally injured ribs with exertion but still he paces. “I gotta find it.”

“Find what?”

“My _phone_! I set it down and now I can’t find it.”

Danny knows he’s panicking, can feel it in the way each jumbo sized breath tugs at his stitches. Junior’s eyes do a highway fast circuit of the room, then land on Danny. The skin around his pinched eyes suddenly softens, smooths, and his hand moves to the man’s bad shoulder. He kneads it carefully with his thumb a little.

Which, weird.

“Danny,” he says, equally soft. “It’s okay.”

Danny bristles at the fact he doesn’t see the seriousness of this situation. “No, it’s not! Grace and Steve text me throughout the day and I have to make sure—”

“Danny…”

“You don’t understand! If something were to—”

“Check your back pocket.”

Everything goes leaden and fuzzy, all at once. Danny isn’t embarrassed; this isn’t that kind of emotion, however intense. His panic ceases almost immediately, though the red face and raging pulse take longer to de-escalate.

After a moment, Danny reaches behind him for the blocky shape of his cellphone. He pulls it out but just stares at the floor beside him, counting heartbeats and feeling the smooth pleather of his phone case in one clenched fist. Both men are struck dumb, terrible and hushed like they’re standing at a memorial instead of Steve’s cluttered living room, and neither say a word.

Junior doesn’t remove his hand for a long, long time.

* * *

Time happens in treacle droplets after that, great big globs of sludge time that stick to Danny and skip him along all at once. There’s coffee and there’s Eddie. There are movie nights that start to blur together and dinners he forgets in the microwave for days at a time.

There is rain. There are showers where he sits instead of stands. Clouds and porpoises chattering way out in the ocean. There is a heartbeat he can feel when he folds his hands under his chin at night.

There is moonlight.

Danny figures he might as well just buy a pedometer to make use of all the steps he’s getting in. He never walked this much even before he got shot.

Tonight, Danny opens his eyes and wakes from a dreamless sleep only once his body has had enough and sat down under a fat palm tree. He’s still in their general neighbourhood, but it’s much farther than he’s ever gone before during one of these episodes, at least two miles away.

Overlooking the ocean, he sits at a little pit stop used by photographers and tourists to take pictures of the shoreline, not much more than a glorified parking lot with rope around it. Danny has scaled this too in his sleep and now sits dangerously close to a drop off. It’s not that far down to the beach, if he were to fall, but the rocks are jagged.

His bad knee burns and shakes and so too does the mangled shoulder. Danny blinks, taking in the scenery, and marvels at the moonlight:

He’s stepped into a black and white movie, George Bailey in _It’s A Wonderful Life_ where everyone forgets he exists.

It’s _gorgeous._

Silver bathes virtually everything, the way the moon is haloed by humidity and therefore the world is hazy. Danny feels it too, a down-filled sensation that only one a.m. calm can provide. The only other colour in this dichromatic scene is a ruby on his fingertips when he touches his face, a nosebleed from the blood pressure drop of so much exercise.

This milky effect extends to the palm fronds, the rope, the rocks, white capped waves, the toes of Danny’s socked feet. He holds out his hands and they’re not quite real either. Blood drips off his knuckles, way down the cliff. Some droplets are caught by the wind, rubies flying away over the waves.

And this time there are no tears, no sobs.

This time Danny laughs.

Laughs and _laughs._ It builds like a tornado in his belly, just a little wisp at first, husky, growing into a swirl of something that twists and explodes. His teeth ache along with his chest but somehow he has never felt so present in the entirety of the past four weeks. Danny’s childhood dream was to be a famous boxer and yet here he is in his forties, stuck under a palm tree in _Hawaii._ The sheer dichotomy of it is the funniest thing in the world right now.

Once the laughter dies, he thinks maybe he could too, so long as it’s at this spot. This moment. This blip in time no other human being on the planet will ever know about.

Danny feels nothing so much like a soldier at the end of a long battle, knowing he’ll never make it home, missing a limb where it’s been blown off, and simply looking for that otherworldly stillness that precedes a transition to it.

It’s not peace, at least not the kind Steve is searching for, but it is still. Danny is a millionaire right now. He is the sole owner of this one moment and finally, finally he’s found something no one can snatch away from him.

How long Danny sits there, watching wind tease at the waves, he’ll never know. He’s too weak to stand anyway.

There is moonlight. And there is wind.

There are crashing waves and there is Danny Williams, laughing until he runs out of air.

Later that day, after quivering knees finally take his weight and he limps home in the nick of time, he and Lou are in the kitchen peeling potatoes. Danny looks out and sees a white crest of moon still visible in the sky’s cloudless panorama.

He smiles and points with his knife. “Cool, huh? The moon sometimes shows up during the day, something to do with reflecting the sun’s light at the just the right angle.”

Lou puts down his own peeler to stare head on at Danny. He nods, to appease the interested note in Danny’s voice, but it’s an absent gesture. Danny knows he’s also looking at the bony bird cage of his ribs, the weight he’s lost—from all the sleepwalking and foggy thoughts and forgetting to eat business.

“Yeah,” Lou says at length. Together, they go back to shredding potatoes. “Yeah, it is pretty neat.”

* * *

“Fifteen minutes.”

Adam frowns some more.

Danny groans from his slump on the couch. “Come on, man. I’m bored out of my mind.”

“I came over here to drop off supper, not to debrief on the theft.”

“Just fifteen minutes.”

The precise moment Adam starts to waver is evidenced by the way he rubs at his jaw.

“Let me help.” Danny drives his argument home. “Just because I’m not able to physically run down criminals by chasing them all over the island, doesn’t mean my brain can’t handle a little detective work.”

Adam slaps the case folder onto the coffee table. “Fifteen minutes. No pushing it.”

“No pushing it,” Danny instantly acquiesces, knowing he can’t wheedle that time into twenty minutes. Not with how sensitive they are right now to the fact that Danny isn’t acting like himself. Junior has gone so far as to _‘check in_ ’ with him every night before bed, especially after the phone incident.

“Where are you with profiles?”

Adam sits on the recliner and lays out photos of their suspects. “We know one of them was involved in the actual jewellery store heist, Ramirez here. But he did it at someone else’s orders, planning, and _that’s_ what we can’t seem to figure out.”

“Hmm.” Danny sifts through their statements. “None of them have records?”

Adam shakes his head. “Not even a parking ticket. My money’s on this professor guy, Dr. Adelaide.”

Danny accepts the proffered docket and skims it. Adelaide fits the profile—smart, thorough, knows his way around security systems thanks to his work in technological anthropology.

“That’s a newer field of specialization. Never heard of technological anthropology.”

“He’s the only one in the country who studies it at this level,” says Adam with a wry look. “So you’re not far off. His alibi looks solid, though, which is why we’re having trouble pinning it down.”

“What alibi? It’s not in the file.”

“About that.” Adam grins, but it’s one of those world weary ones cops throw each other when they know more than they wish they did. “He was in his office at the time of the theft—already a shaky alibi—but he’s dating another teacher. Behind closed doors, you know…”

“Okay, okay. I get the picture.” Danny holds up a hand to stop a more detailed explanation. “She confirms this alibi?”

“To the letter.” Adam sighs. “She knew details about his schedule and office that she couldn’t possibly have made up on the spot. Professor Charning even has an eidetic memory: she confirmed which ungraded papers were on the top of his ‘to do’ pile for the day and to which individual student they belonged.”

Danny’s brows hike. “Wow. Alright. So they were getting cozy during lunch, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in on the heist.”

With a spark in his eye, Adam snaps his fingers. “Exactly! That’s my theory, though Lou doesn’t agree with me. His money is on one of the security people at the store, an inside job.”

Danny quickly flips to the second suspect. His nose wrinkles. “Nope, doesn’t fit.”

“Why?” Sliding to the edge of the chair, Adam sits straighter. “What makes you say that?”

“He’s a high school drop out, never finished tenth grade. While I don’t want to judge here, is he really the sort to organize a team of thieves, complete with overriding biometric scanners in their way? That, and it says here he just had a new baby.”

“So?”

Danny smiles. “So, trust me—no man with a new child in the house has time to sneak around having secret meetings with a ring of jewel thieves. Even if he did, how would his wife not notice?”

Adam’s slow nod picks up speed while he thinks. “Makes sense, actually. His wife said he’s been home every night. They switch shifts with the baby and sometimes when they can’t fall back to sleep, they watch a movie together.”

“There you go.” Danny closes the man’s file. “This heist, the complexity of it, would take at least a month to plan. According to this guy you caught, they met in person at least two nights a week before the heist yesterday. Do you have a name on the guy yet?”

Adam hesitates. It’s such a strange look on his normally steady, decisive personality, the startled eyes and mouth working without sound, that Danny does a double take while looking up from the file.

“What?”

“Danny…I already told you his name.”

Danny freezes, racking his sieve-like brain for the beginning of this conversation. It already feels like it happened hours ago, on brand for all his conversations lately. “Ramone.”

“Ramirez.”

“Right.” Danny looks away. “That’s what I meant.”

Adam is silent again, but the churning of his thoughts is just as loud. He shuffles even closer, so that his knee nearly touches Danny’s, and it’s warm too. Danny keeps his eyes firmly on the Doc’s suspect photo, anything to avoid the strong wavelength of Adam’s pity.

“Danny—”

“Don’t.” Danny rests his head on his fist for a moment, eyes closed. “I’m fine, Adam.”

“…Are you sure about that?”

_No. I’m not sure about anything anymore._

“You’re worse than Steve when he calls. Always badgering me about eating and sleeping.”

Adam doesn’t fall for the distraction. “I know someone you can talk to, a good therapist, you know…if you ever need to, or if it gets to the point where you can’t handle it.”

Danny is at that point now, but pretending he's not is better than trying to dig himself back to the surface of real life again. Just the thought of it leaves his bones weeping. He opens his eyes to see Adam’s concerned ones gazing back at him, a little bright.

“I’m not the one who’s messed up, okay?” Danny knows this like he knows oxygen. “Steve needs megaton levels of healing, hence why he up and left. Adam, I’m shocked he didn’t bail years ago, with all the trauma he’s lived through.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to talk about yours.” Adam’s voice is terribly quiet, muted like he’s speaking through a carpet.

“What’s there to talk about?”

Adam laughs, short and cynical. “Take your pick, Danny. You’ve got a whole greatest hits to choose from.”

“We all do.”

“Can’t argue with that.” Adam’s eyes turn considering, still huddled close. “Danny, you know nobody expects you to come back to work until you’re ready, right? You don’t have to come back at all if you don’t want to.”

“I think…” Danny’s eyes are back on a middle distance he can’t see. “I think it’s the only thing keeping me sane, the promise that there’s a point to it all.”

Adam nods again. “One day at a time, Danny. That’s all any of us can do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alma is a real place and if you ever get a chance to eat their sticky buns - I highly recommend! They're beyond delicious.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Closes his eyes, and there is only the living room.
> 
> Opens them.
> 
> And he’s sitting at the foot of Steve’s bed.

‘What was it inside you that love never satisfied?  
The thin thread that held you, how did it come untied?  
The grace you only ran from, the bridges that you burned  
The peace of mind you learned to live without.’

“Hope You Found It Now” ~ Jason Walker

Closes his eyes, and there is only the living room.

Opens his eyes.

And he’s lying, coiled up nearly fetal, in the flower beds again. They’re tender, pillowing his head. A fat bumblebee buzzes at an anthurium near his nose.

* * *

Closes his eyes, and there is only the living room.

Opens his eyes…

And Danny is standing beside Steve’s beach chair.

* * *

“Throw it here, bud!”

Charlie does, though the softball sails too far and Danny has to retrieve it from some bushes.

“Sorry!”

“That’s okay.” Danny winds up the next pitch with his right arm. The yellow ball sails into Charlie’s outstretched hands. “You’re just getting stronger, that’s all.”

This is enough to perk up Charlie’s disappointment. He throws it back. “Hey, Danno?”

“Yeah?” At a twinge, Danny is thankful for a break so some of the swelling ache can go down. “Why the long face?”

Suddenly, Charlie closes the distance between them on the lawn and Danny instinctively opens his arms, frowning when the boy buries his face in Danny’s chest. He rests his mouth on the feathery blond hair. His son grips him tighter.

“Charlie? What’s going on?”

“I’m going to miss this.”

Danny’s heart seizes. “You don’t have to, bud. You’re always welcome here.”

Charlie doesn’t remove his face and now Danny has to fight to keep calm.

“Mom’s been on the phone a lot,” he mumbles.

Danny tries to piece this together, mind racing. “Okay…”

“They’re offering her a big job on the west coast.”

Some moments in life sink in slowly, by stages. Others…others descend with swift, merciless brutality. Danny’s hands halt their soothing strokes across Charlie’s back. “You guys are moving?”

Charlie sniffles. “She’s not sure yet.”

“Oh.” Danny cups the back of his son’s head, closing his eyes to bask in the sunshine, the warmth of this small life in his arms, and the way things are right now, for however long they’ll stay that way. “Charlie—I will always love you and be there for you, no matter where you go.”

“You promise?” Charlie leans back, smiling.

Danny kisses his forehead so he can’t see his lips shake. “Always. You’re stuck with me.”

* * *

Closes his eyes, and there is only the living room.

Opens his eyes:

And Danny finds himself standing on the roof of their house. The shingle tiles are cool on his bare toes, sunrise beginning in pink feathers across the horizon.

He has somehow scaled the ladder left there by Junior to clean the rain troughs. In his _sleep._ The novelty of that definitely hasn’t worn off yet, that he can somehow makes such impossible hand eye coordinated movements without his eyes even being _open_.

His knee, his shoulder, all of it aches. The white line of his toes is barely five inches from the edge. It would be so easy to take one loose step and just…drop. Terribly easy. Why are the worst decisions always so easy? 

He swallows—hard—and doesn’t say a word while carefully picking his way back down.

* * *

“Where is it this time?”

Panting. The clickity-ther-clack of skateboard wheels hitting pavement. “ _Reykjavík._ ”

“Iceland.” Danny’s daytime feet are wandering this time, down the beach to a tourist trap for some ice cream. It’s been an extra cookie dough kind of day. “What are you doing, backpacking the world’s oceans?”

“ _Something like that._ ”

The naked honesty in Steve’s voice is what stops Danny this time, the lack of pretense or deflection or persistence. “I hate to break it to you, babe, but if you’re in Iceland—technically it’s still the same ocean as the Bay.”

“ _I know that! And_ technically _, I’m seeing the Greenland Sea, not the North Atlantic yet._ ”

“Know it all.”

The man is still huffing and puffing on the other end, interjected now and then with a grunt or “ _oww!”_

Danny puts it together. “Wait…you’re not near a skate park, are you?”

“ _‘Course not. I’m overlooking the water._ ”

Because, well…where else would he be? Danny certainly can’t picture anything else. Steve is quite literally part seal at this point and he’s only half joking when he says he’s not sure Steve would survive more than a few days away from the water.

“I assumed I was hearing some kids in the background but that’s all you, isn’t it?”

“ _Yup. And I’m killing it._ ”

Danny orders his ice cream and while he waits, he tries to picture Steve doing a kick flip. “You’ve taken up skateboarding since your little _Eat, Pray, Love_ vacation. That’s cute.”

Steve’s focus is funneled solely into not face planting on the pavement, but there’s a smile in his voice. “ _I never got to as a kid, so I’m trying to learn now. And it’s longboarding, actually._ ”

“You go, Walter Mitty.” Danny licks at his rapidly melting cone and delights in the fact that his teeth ache from the cold this time around, something so innocent and mundane as ice cream. “Don’t run into any volcanoes.”

“ _I’m not that bad, Danno. It’s a lot like surfing, obviously, just a little more touchy than a waxed board.”_

And so saying, Steve audibly trips. The board’s clattering rolls away and Steve tumbles around in a roll, the audio fading in and out.

Danny grins. “You still there, Steve? You good?”

There’s a muffled curse, far away, and then Steve’s wheezing broadcasts in stereo. “ _Skinned both my knees!_ ”

“Aww that sucks, babe. Sorry to hear it.”

“ _I called you this time._ ”

The ice cream is almost gone, but some of it still oozes down Danny’s hand when he jerks in surprise. “Did you hit your head, Steve? Of course you called me—that’s how we’re talking. Any double vision? You remember where you are?”

“ _I don’t have a concussion, Danny. I’m wearing a helmet. But I called you this week.”_

Danny was just shot fifty days ago and doesn’t have enough belt holes left for how loose his pants are. Food tastes like ash. He’s tired and miserable and his feet are sore from the constant sleep walking. Therefore, he can’t quite decode this statement.

Sue him.

“Ye-ah.” Danny draws the word out. “You did. What’s your point?”

Steve is walking now, carrying the board. Danny can hear it in the way his shoes _whap, whap_ on the blacktop.

“ _So why do you never call me? Huh? You know you can any time._ ”

“…Any time.”

“ _Yeah, I mean I’m always available to chat._ ”

Danny throws the rest of his cone into the trash. Right there. Right now. Trembling from head to sandaled toe. “No.”

“ _No?_ ”

“We are not doing this. Not now and certainly not when it’s suddenly convenient for you.”

“ _It’s always been convenient for me._ ”

“Stop lying. Please, Steve. Do what you need to for this healing process, but don’t you dare make it my fault.”

“ _Your fault? Of course it’s not._ ”

Danny has never felt so toyed with in his entire life. “Make your peace, Steve.”

“ _Danno—_ ”

Danny hangs up and turns off his phone. He trembles himself all the way down the beach until his legs won’t support him anymore, over an hour later. They fold in a graceful lawn chair snap and he realizes that he’s actually sitting below his silvery lookout perch of a few nights ago.

He lies there, watching the sun fade away, kept alive by the moon’s memory.

* * *

Closes his eyes, and there is only the living room.

Opens them.

And he’s sitting at the foot of Steve’s bed.

* * *

Lou looks over at Danny for perhaps the _millionth_ time on this trip alone, even though they’re parked now in the Five-O lot. His smug satisfaction is like choking incense in the car.

Danny rolls his eyes and eases out. “I can’t believe you didn’t let me drive my own car. Is this Steve’s over reaching influence from the proverbial grave?”

“Nope.” Lou has the audacity to chuckle while they walk inside the building. “This is me adhering to _your_ doctor’s orders to take it easy. I know you’re off the tranquilizer-style meds, but come on. You can barely pull open the fridge door.”

 _If only you knew_ , Danny thinks, and is surprised by how bitter it tastes on his tongue. At least he’d had the foresight to take the ladder down after he climbed back down to terra firma four nights ago.

“You get a free pass for now,” says Danny, going for a more upbeat tone. “Only because you drove me into work and not said doctor’s office.”

Lou opens the glass door with a dramatic arm sweep. “After you.”

“Don’t milk it.”

Lou just snickers some more and follows him into the bullpen. Only Tani and Junior are congregated around the table, with Quinn, Adam, and Cole out chasing a lead on their mysterious jewellery heist. Dr. Adelaide never came into work after the heist and it’s become a manhunt more than a puzzle to solve.

“I’m not cleared for fieldwork.” Danny accepts the welcome-back hugs. “But give me a desk and I’ll intimidate some paperwork for you.”

Tani winks. “Right this way, boss. I’ve got a stack of invoices and arrest reports ready for approval with your name on it.”

“Nothing more exciting than that, huh?”

“Now really.” In a sharp _plop_ , Tani saddles Danny’s desk with two stacks of file folders. “Would we do that to you on your first day back?”

Danny puts up the mandatory grumble but his steps are lighter than they’ve been in weeks at finally getting out of the house, set to a task that has nothing to do with recovery.

The job might not be one he can come back to in the same capacity he did before, but for now his head is clear as a bell and that’s enough.

 _Danny_ , just Danny, feels like enough.

He can breathe.

* * *

See, the thing is that somewhere deep down, like _way_ deep down, Danny is still convinced—just a little bit, not the out loud, for real kind of convinced—that this somnambulance thing is all a dream. That it isn’t truly happening and if it is, there’s some magic to it that makes the whole thing easier to forget in the morning. Other than exertion based pain, he hasn’t seriously injured himself or caused any lasting damage to the house.

It’s almost kind of interesting, to see where he’ll open his eyes. A mini Narnia field trip with no discernible beginning or end.

He could wake up in New York one morning and it wouldn’t feel a whole lot different from the levels of surprise at waking up lying in the sand or standing on the roof or that one time he opened his eyes to see he had wandered _into_ the ocean. It had nearly yanked him clean off his feet before he fumbled back to shore.

So when he nods off at his desk after lunch, and Tani pokes at him to lie down on the office couch for a minute, ‘rest his eyes’ style—he forgets. Sleepwalking is a thing that’s private. That occurs at night, when Danny’s feet are as lost as his mind. It’s as foggy a concept as the recesses of his mind and therefore no one can touch it, least of all him.

Danny closes his eyes while studying a picture on the desk of he, Grace, and Steve, that day they first taught her to drive. They’d stopped for burgers after, and the picture, a selfie taken by Steve, captures them all mid-laugh.

One minute he’s looking at the photo, remembering. Closes his eyes.

Opens them—

And a car horn _blares_.

It’s so loud and so inch-close that Danny thinks he has to be instantly deaf. He’s having trouble opening his eyes all the way, heavy as they are. He wants to sleep, to forget, to remember.

“Danny! _Danny_!”

“Watch the car!”

“Get him back!”

“What is he—”

Danny is in a washing machine, tossed around by rough hands on his arms and the whistle of swerving trucks. More ear-splitting car horns. The uncoordinated, panicked hands nearly tear his good arm out of its socket, forcing his feet from pavement back onto something soft.

There’s so much _sound._ Shouting and crying and swearing and engines too close _too close_ and…

Crying?

Danny finally wrestles his eyelids into cooperation through what feels like Colossal effort. His knees give out and the shouting crescendos. Hands are all over him, checking his pulse, tearing open the top buttons of his shirt, palpitating his abdomen. Scrabbling around his skull like shaky spider legs.

He’s lowered carefully onto the grass and against something sturdy and equally loud.

Danny must not be firing on all cylinders. It takes him a solid minute to solve the mystery—he’s sitting back against Lou’s chest. He only knows this when he looks down to see dark arms harnessed across his ribs, and that distinctive Hawaiian shirt sleeve flaps against his cheek.

It finally registers:

Tani is _crying_.

Shouting too, angrier than a hornet, but weeping while counting off Danny’s bpm to Junior, kneeling on Danny’s other side. They’re asking Danny questions faster than fired bullets, a machine gun of alarm and hysterical concern; none of them make any sense. Neither, too, does the sun beating relentlessly down on their heads.

That’s not right. He never opens his eyes when the sun is this present.

What does make sense, all of a sudden, is that Tani’s slender fingers have settled right over the shackle scar on Danny’s wrist, that will never fade as long as he lives. Her skin is eucalyptus cool against his flushed. She must have some of the magic in her too, the way pain dissipates at her touch, even the perpetual ache in Danny’s skull. 

“Danny?” Lou’s voice rumbles under his ear. “You with us? You done fighting our attempts to save your fool life?”

Danny frowns. He tries to form words, their grains of sand trickling away between his fingers before he can hurtle them to his mouth.

Junior lowers one of Danny’s lids, once he’s done checking for a head injury. “He’s responsive. Sir? Any reason you decided to stand out in the middle of lunch hour traffic?”

“We thought you were just taking a walk, clearing your head.” Tani breathes out a shaky sound. “But then you wouldn’t respond when we called your name. It was like a trance and you never even opened your eyes.”

Danny’s breathing is too fast but Tani’s thumb strokes once over the cross, red scar and he lands back in his own body. Jig’s up, he supposes. He’d forgotten the risk of taking a nap or sleeping in front of other people, making this his own fault.

“Mthm…feet just…go.”

“Oh yeah, no, we figured that part out real quick,” Lou snaps. “How long you been hiking in your sleep?”

Junior’s face is especially tight.

Danny tries to lift a hand and finds himself surprisingly weak. There are new bruises on his arms too. They’re worth it in exchange for his life, grey and fuzzy as it is right now. “Not y’r fault.”

“It kind of is,” Junior argues. “You’re quiet about it, but I still should have known something wasn’t right. Is this what your Lego purchase ‘for Charlie’ was really all about?”

Danny doesn’t answer and they swear softly.

“Are you telling me this has been going on for _weeks_?” Tani’s face falls. “And you didn’t think to tell us!”

“Let me guess.” Now Lou’s voice is, somehow, the quietest of them all. It’s a knife straight to the solar plexus. “Since Steve left?”

Danny rolls his jaw and then nods once, curt. How does he find words for it, that this isn’t pining or longing—that this is plain old survival? That some hidden river underneath the desert of Danny’s being has been dammed up and now he’s slowly drying up? Steve left and so did Danny, however physically present his body might be.

Junior has his phone out in record time and this rouses Danny to the tinsel crash of reality. They _know._ They all know and he’ll never experience a moment’s peace again. They know the struggle but they _don’t_ , they can’t possibly.

He flinches. Lou’s grip tightens instinctively.

“Wait—”

“Danny.” Junior has never looked so sober, so scared. “You nearly died.”

“And? So? It’s not like that’s a new thing in my life.”

Tani gasps but Junior’s lips thin with worry. “He has to know what’s been happening.”

“No. He doesn’t.” Danny allows some hardness of authority to enter his tone, even dizzy. It works in that Junior wavers and doesn’t hit Steve’s number right away. “He wants to be free of responsibility or crisis for a while and so that’s exactly what we’re going to respect. No need to go getting the whole world into a tizzy about something that isn’t life threatening.”

Three matching upset cries protest this. Danny realizes his mistake and uses his free hand to massage at the bullet scar’s stabbing pain. “What I mean is, it’ll be okay. I’m…dealing with it.”

Lou jostles him, gentle, to get his attention. “Boy, you were almost struck by a car. To be honest, I’m still not sure how you weren’t. Bloody miracle. That doesn’t look dealt with to me and by the time you do, there might not be much left. At least let us help you.”

Tani’s eyes swim and she squeezes Danny’s hand. “Please. This isn’t healthy.”

“It’s just sleepwalking.” Danny’s argument sounds feeble even to his own ears. He knows he’s flirting with death in a way that’s not just unconscious.

Junior finally puts his phone away. Then, hand once again on Danny’s bad shoulder, he shakes his head. “There’s no shame in drowning, sir. The only shameful thing is not grabbing a life preserver when it’s thrown to you. This might be the only one you truly get.”

Danny doesn’t break, but he exhales a shuddering breath and flips his hand so it cradles Tani’s.

She nods, flicking away a tear. “We’ll figure it out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The team knows!! Finally! 
> 
> Also, this fic is getting long, y'all. I keep having inspirations for new scenes but I think I've wrapped it up for good. I'll post more later this week!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blood drips onto the linoleum.
> 
> Danny follows the trail back up to Junior’s hand, where a mangled, four inch wide gash weeps along his left palm, from his index finger to the heel of his hand. The top of Eddie’s head is stained with it, where he cowers by the lanai doors.

‘Your breakdown was easy to see  
And it took you away, further from me.  
And I’m falling down  
Like it’s holy ground,  
I’m looking for you again.’

“Looking for You Again” ~ Matthew Perryman Jones

‘Figuring it out,’ in the end and after much debating, turns out to be a rotation schedule—Junior has it _laminated—_ pinned to the fridge. Every night, someone sleeps in the recliner so they can hear if Danny stands up and starts walking around.

There’s something gritty under his skin about the fact he has a witness for these episodes. If he thought privacy was a commodity before, it’s downright extinct now. At least he draws the line for someone sitting in the bathroom while he showers. He’s fine while awake, thank you.

That same night he nearly got creamed on the road, he wakes with Lou shaking his arm.

Despite it all and Lou’s best efforts, they’re still standing out on the lanai.

“Almost snuck right past me,” says Lou, breathless with the wonder of watching something for which he apparently has no words. He rubs sleep from his eyes. “I gotcha, Danny. You’re okay.”

Danny is meekly led back to bed like a sick child and he only swears at Lou a little. Maybe a lot.

“It has something to do with not waking a person who’s sleeping walking, if possible.” Tani scrolls through an article about it on her phone the next morning. “They get frustrated and combative, like you were both times yesterday.”

Danny sighs, raising his spoonful of cornflakes in a toast. “Mazel tov.”

He manages to convince Grace and Rachel that he’s recovering well, just like he’s been doing so far with every phone call. The one trade off of this intrusive arrangement is that the team has agreed to keep it in-house and not tell anyone. They’ve threatened to call Steve a few times, but it never sticks.

One night it is Adam standing at Danny’s side when he opens his eyes, all the way out on the beach. He’s not touching or saying anything, just watching with something fond, amused. Wind and salt whip through their clothes.

Danny glances askance at his curious eyes. “How long this time?”

“You mostly just did a few laps of the kitchen and then came out here. I followed but you woke up on your own. We’re trying not to touch you if possible, like Tani suggested.”

“Huh.” Danny wags his head back and forth. He’s struck with a new thought, one that hasn’t occurred to him yet. “Do I talk when this happens?”

“Not a word. Not even a peep or a sigh. I tried to get your attention, talk to you, and you just floated right on out the door.”

“Better than last night—I almost gave Quinn a heart attack with the ladder.”

Adam laughs. “Trying to climb the roof?”

“Seems to be a trend.”

And so it goes.

Danny feels uncomfortable, the same innate, hard to explain discomfort that comes from wearing clothes your mom bought for you when they don’t fit quite right. The team is already being generous by agreeing to keep the secret, so really what else can he do but smile thinly and be grateful?

Apparently he can do a lot more, as he finds out three nights later.

* * *

Closes his eyes, and there is only the living room.

Opens them.

And Quinn is lying beside him on the lawn, sunbathing. Aviators, one piece, and all. She smirks at him when she notices he’s awake.

“Thought you’d never get up.” She holds out a bottle. “Sunscreen?”

* * *

Dreams are a luxury.

Right up until they are not.

Danny doesn’t dream often, not since Steve left, and if he does they’re random images, disconnected but beautiful like pearls on a string. The only nightmares he has are mostly disjointed memory fragments, his mind processing the pendulum swing of his body from chains on the ceiling, the sound of his own ribs breaking in stereo off cement walls. Sometimes it’s just an uneasy feeling while standing in a sandy desert, or sometimes he’s lucky enough to hear a voice singing and not be able to find it.

Not tonight—tonight every dark fear slithers in full technicolour through a macabre, haunted house version of the McGarrett home. Up the stairs. Blood on the walls.

Danny pants. “Steve? Steve, you in here?”

He is not, but their attacker is. Some distant part of Danny’s consciousness still on line objects the fact that out of all the larger than life psychopaths they’ve faced, his brain has to choose the all-black intruder who shoved him into a TV to be the villain of this nightmare.

Rude.

Danny gets side tracked when there’s a rustle in the kitchen. He doesn’t have his gun. Where is his _gun_? He pats himself but all he has is a peeling knife.

_It’ll have to do._

The prickly feeling of its worn plastic against his tired skin bolsters his courage. He can do this. He _can_ , even if Steve is down for the count somewhere. He’ll defend their space. Just because he’s the only one who wants it anymore, doesn’t mean he’ll abandon it.

“Danny? You wanna get with the program here? Hey—!”

A few more steps and he can see a shady figure rummaging through the kitchen. If the man is looking for intel, then he certainly picked a strange place.

Suddenly, arms lasso around Danny’s torso. Another intruder this time! He brought friends— _Should have planned for that, Danny. They always bring reinforcements the second time._

The knife falls from his fingers and he writhes.

“Junes, get him back—”

“Lucid dreaming, almost like he’s awake—”

“Easy, Danny.”

Danny most definitely does not take it easy. He’s kicking for all he’s worth. He even manages to lever up and push off the fridge, slamming his attacker against the doorframe. The arms loosen but don’t release and Danny feels a new rush of fear. This man is bigger than him, by a lot.

Survival instincts and years of training kick in, enough for Danny to slam his head back and clip someone in the nose.

“ _Lou_! Are you okay?”

“I’m alright. He just got a lucky hit in there. Like tryna hold a greased otter.”

“Danny.” Someone is tapping his cheek. “You’re okay. Everything’s okay—you’re safe.”

“Sir? You wanna open your eyes and see for yourself?”

Danny breathes hard but sure enough, in the next moment…the scene transforms. He really is in the kitchen, feet hoisted nearly off the floor, but there’s no attacker. Just Tani, trying to touch him from a distance and Lou above him with a bleeding nose, biting off words that would probably makes his mother rinse his mouth out, and…

“J…Jun’r?”

Danny’s world is in a tailspin, so the word comes out as a garble. Everyone has turned into statues, also breathing hard and eyeing Danny without blinking. Shocked, strung tight, arms out with readiness to step in if he turns violent again.

At his gravelly question, everyone’s eyes swing in the same direction, onto Junior who has snatched up the knife Lou somehow managed to wrestle away. There’s a soft _pat…pat…pat_ that raises every last hair on Danny’s arms—

Blood drips onto the linoleum.

Danny follows the trail back up to Junior’s hand, where a mangled, four inch wide gash weeps along his left palm, from his index finger to the heel of his hand. The top of Eddie’s head is stained with it, where he cowers by the lanai doors.

Danny’s eyes widen, horrified, his stomach pulsing with a sky-falling level of dread. “Junior—”

“It’s okay,” the young man hastens to reassure. “You didn’t know. Probably stuck in a nightmare, I’m guessing? We’ll call it self defense.”

“I hurt you.” Danny’s gaze rotates from an ashen faced Tani to Lou’s gushing nose, back to Junior’s hand. Which will most certainly need stitches at that depth, a lot of them. “Junior. _I hurt you_.”

_You hurt them all._

“It’s—”

“No, it’s not!” Danny explodes and Lou finally releases his bear hold. “None of this is okay! Did I seriously pick up that knife in my _sleep_?”

Lou tears off a wad of paper towel and holds it to his nostrils. “It was our fault anyway, for leaving that sitting out on the drying board. I’m just glad I stayed a little longer before handing off the night shift to you two.”

The implication there, that Danny could have done a lot more damage to Junior without Lou present—in potentially vital organ areas of his body—is a klaxon inside his ears. This arrangement was a sacrifice, for all of them, and this is how he repays that love. He _really_ does not deserve them.

“You need a hospital,” Danny says at length, very quiet.

“It’s deep enough for stitches,” Tani confirms, though her eyes are wide and fretting on Danny.

Lou nods. “You two go. I’ve got him.”

None of them move. They are still strapped this adrenaline roller coaster with no way to get off. Eddie’s soft whine makes them all jump.

“Go.” Danny has never felt more tired in his life. Not once. No incident rivals this poison dart type of waking leech upon his soul. “And for what it’s worth, I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

“Of course we do, Danny.” Tani rubs his arm on the way out the door. “We’re family.”

Danny smiles tightly and gently removes her hand. “Be safe.”

After washing Eddie and guilt-cleaning the entire kitchen floor, Danny has to sit down by the island, lightheaded. Eddie whines some more, licking at Danny’s pale skin. The mandatory ear rub completed, Danny sighs.

Shame dominates, of course, along with a generous heaping of relief that Steve wasn’t here to see this. The ugly truth that Danny will attack his own friends if he falls apart enough.

It is beyond pathetic to the realm of something else, something dark and dangerous Danny doesn’t have a name for. Something that has been dragging him down from the moment Steve walked away. Junior was right about the life preserver—but what is he supposed to do when the life preserver springs a leak?

“Danny?”

Danny jolts back to the present, only to realize by Lou’s tone that his name has been said more than once.

“Sorry, Lou. What was that?”

“I asked, are you good here while I go up and shower off some of this blood real quick? I won’t be ten minutes.”

“Yeah, of course. And Lou?”

Lou turns back around from trundling up the stairs.

Danny swallows. “Sorry I nearly broke your nose. For fighting you.”

Lou considers him with unreadable eyes, then snorts. This tapers off with a wince. “You think you’re the first man to try and take a crack at my schnoz? We’re good, Danny. No one blames you for this.”

“They should,” Danny blurts, razor sharp, before he can stop himself.

Lou’s smile drops and he comes forward to lean on the table, at eye level with Danny. “Williams, are you listening to me?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Good, then lemme make it abundantly clear that no one holds you responsible for what happened here tonight. Do doctors blame a sick patient? No, of course not and the same rule applies here. Your mind has its wires crossed, that’s all. It’s our job to help you untangle ‘em.”

Danny offers another weak smile, still rubbing at the fold of Eddie’s ears. They’re soft and gunky with still-drying soap. Lou pats the top of Danny’s hand and then he’s gone.

Danny waits until he hears the shower running and then he’s off. Clothes are thrown into a bag, whatever he can grab fast and stuff down to the bottom fast. Eddie watches him, whining, but doesn’t bark.

“Good boy,” Danny whispers, while creeping into the kitchen for a piece of paper.

Once his pen is ready, he hits a wall, the prelude to an inevitable crash. Danny blinks at the paper, overwhelmed with a dearth of what to say.

He almost writes, ‘ _Seems like everyone is better off without me,_ ’ but that’s too much dramatic teenager in one sentence so he settles on a simple—‘ _Gone to clear my head. Be back in a few days._ ’

Danny isn’t sure if this is true, but he can’t very well hide away for the rest of his life. Tempting as that option may be. He leaves his phone on the coffee table and escapes out the door at the exact moment Lou finishes his shower, faucet creaking.

Danny only takes one last look in the rear view mirror while driving away, his first time at the wheel in two months. Driving at night is tricky, after so long without even doing it in daylight hours, but he manages.

The McGarrett house shrinks away in the distance and Danny somehow knows, with rock solid surety, that he’ll never sleep there again.

* * *

Most Air BnBs don’t accept cash but Danny manages to find the one rental property on the island that will. It’s a tiny cottage at the base of some mountain Steve would probably know the name of, isolated enough that Danny feels secure staying there, at least for a little while. The owner lives on the property, but in a little loft above the garage so that Danny has the house to himself.

It’s quiet. That’s the best luxury it affords and Danny doesn’t care that the bed pokes at his back or the bathroom tap leaks, _ploink ploink_ sounds late into the night, so long as it’s quiet.

Come to think of it…this is the first night he’s spent in a real bed in _months_ , so that counts for a lot in Danny’s book. There’s even some sandwich fixings in the fridge, saving him the trouble of going out for groceries.

The first night, Danny is pleased to find that he only sleep walks out onto the porch, waking up standing at the railing. It’s almost a quaint habit, how his body consistently manages to find the best angle for the sunrise and wake him up in time for it.

That second night…

The second night Danny opens his eyes to find himself standing on _top_ of the railing. The little hillside sloping away from the cottage isn’t all that steep.

It would still be _more_ than enough for a double leg break if Danny were to jump.

He scrambles off the railing and back against the porch doors, hands shaking. Each heartbeat piston presses into his throat. A noose-like sense of vertigo springs in vicious tugs at Danny’s stomach and he tastes bile.

He’s gone before the home owner wakes, leaving a tip on the cottage table and driving away with the sunrise.

Danny doesn’t stop at lunch time. He doesn’t pull over for dinner, not even when the sun sets. Danny drives and drives and _drives_. He is determined to stay awake at all costs.

It doesn’t work, of course, and after veering into the oncoming lane one too many times, along with his failing gas gauge, Danny pulls over in the middle of nowhere just when his engine finally dies. There are barely any other cars around, no houses for miles in either direction. It’s all wild land, trees and mountains.

Danny gets out and collapses, knees drawn tight to his chest. He leans against the bumper and its heat drills into his spine, popping from the never ending highway driving.

Dry sobs push from cracked lips, elbows on his knees and head nestled in twitching hands. His mouth is dry, joints throbbing. He can’t hear the ocean here, and so he mourns for that. He mourns for being lost, in every sense, for empty chairs. For empty beds. For driving his own car. For thieves that come in the daytime, who steal away beautiful things.

He mourns for waning moonlight.

This time, Danny doesn’t sleep. Darkness creeps over his eyes in celluloid splatters before he even notices the claim of unconsciousness.

His last sight is an albatross, circling high above on a carpet of stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're gettin' real now! No more running and no more hiding from the team, especially Steve. Thank you everyone for your lovely comments!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rain is relentless and so, of course, is Steve.
> 
> “Why didn’t you tell me?”
> 
> Danny’s foot gives a warning twitch. “You don’t get to ask me that.”

‘Maybe you and I were never meant to be complete  
Could we just be broken together?  
If you can bring your shattered dreams and I’ll bring mine  
Could healing still be spoken and save us?  
The only way we’ll last forever is broken together.’

“Broken Together” ~ Casting Crowns

The hands are back.

And he’s _wet_.

Danny physically cannot open his eyes and it is this fact that frightens him into awareness. Not the cold, not the involuntary shivers, not the clothes pasted to his body, not a terrified voice jabbering insistently at him.

No, Danny Williams has officially reached the stage where opening his eyes is too much.

He attempts to bat the hands away and is startled by his weakness. The loss of weight has also heralded a loss of strength—he hasn’t eaten in almost forty-eight hours, to top it all off—and Danny doesn’t truly understand this until he grabs someone’s arm, to wrench it far from his soaked skin, and they easily scoop both of Danny’s wrists into one hand. It’s so forceful that it lifts his right shoulder off the bumper.

Forget a hard fight—he doesn’t stand a chance like this.

Shivers become shakes.

 _Stupid stupid stupid._ He’s sitting alone on a barren stretch of highway with his car doors _unlocked_ and not even enough strength to stop someone from taking advantage of him. Talk about an easy target. _You know better._

He’s not too thrilled about the pinned wrists either. Graphic memories spring to mind in incendiary flashes. He knows he won’t survive another kidnapping.

Danny tries to yank them back. “Go ‘way. You wan’ my wallet? Take it. Back pock’t.”

“I don’t want your wallet, you stubborn—”

“Go ‘ _way_!”

“Would you—”

Danny flies into the territory of raw, old fashioned fear now, knowing he hasn’t a hope or prayer of getting out of this if they don’t leave. His whole body trembles.

He kicks out in a last ditch effort, nicking someone’s shin. “Don’t touch me!”

“Hey, hey, hey.” The grip on his wrists relaxes, turns into something comforting instead of restraining. A thumb strokes at his temple. “I’m not going to hurt you, Danno.”

Danny goes still. The whole world stills with him.

His skin jitters with goosebumps and dehydration, and he’s pretty sure hallucinations are one of the first symptoms of low blood sugar. That or he’s lucid dreaming again, some limbo type between a dream and a nightmare. He’s not sure he wants this to be real at all.

It is only that same sheer stubbornness that propels Danny’s eyes open, just a slit at first. Though a pick up truck is parked down the road, crooked like someone squealed to a stop there, the ambient headlights stab into the back of his skull. He closes his eyes, breathing deeply, and tries again.

It’s still night time, thunder crashing overhead and enough rain spitting up all over the world that Danny wonders if Steve somehow managed to bring all the oceans with him.

He’s sopping wet too, crouched over his heels in front of Danny’s sprawled form, one hand bracing Danny’s head so it doesn’t flop back against the car, the other gently, slowly squeezing Danny’s wrists. He has quite literally become a handful. A jacket has been thrown over his legs at some point, not that it helps much against the deluge.

And Steve is paler than a sand dollar.

He’s shaking a bit himself, eyes darting over Danny, checking his pupil dilation and going huge when he sees the outline of every single one of Danny’s ribs.

“Danno…”

Danny kicks out again, one hundred percent in his right mind this round. The hit connects with a scuffed knee. Steve responds immediately by letting go and jumping back. He keeps his hands up where Danny can see them. His bare shin has already started to bruise, along with his knees where he clearly raced to Danny’s parked car and slid to the ground, a compound scrape with the skinned knees.

Breathing harder than a matador’s bull, Danny licks the rain falling on his lips. Steve notices and holds out a bottle of orange juice. Danny eyes it, and Steve, for a long minute. Something in his friend’s eyes is scared too, and this is the sole reason Danny feels safe enough to reach out and take it. He makes sure their hands don’t touch.

Danny downs half the bottle in one go. The citric acid probably isn’t wise, on an empty stomach, but Danny doesn’t regret it when his head instantly clears, at least enough to sit up without swaying.

The rain is relentless and so, of course, is Steve.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Danny’s foot gives a warning twitch. “You don’t get to ask me that.”

“That’s too bad because I just did.” Steve creeps closer, ignoring the glare. “I flew all the way from Cape Town the same hour I got a frantic call from Lou that you dropped off the map and the team couldn’t track you. And upon arriving in Hawaii I immediately started driving. Know why?”

Danny plays with the bottle cap and fights hard not to give Steve a matching bruise on the other leg. “I guess I’m the catastrophe now, huh?”

Steve stares at him.

“Danny…you are never a problem, never a burden.”

“Didn’t stop you the first time.”

“That’s not why I left.”

“Doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“Danny—”

“You’re the real thief. You ran off with it all.” Danny suppresses a hitch in his chest. The words make no sense but Steve looks devastated anyway. “I invested everything, every last cent of who I am, and you spent it. I’m not mad at that, Steve. You need peace and I still think you going away was a good idea.”

Steve sits back on his heels. “Oh yeah? Then what are you mad at?”

“Me, mostly.”

Steve doesn’t say anything at all, and for twelve thready heartbeats neither does Danny. He can feel them both in the rain, thrashing, pulsing, falling. Two people who cycle like water through a world that uses them up, only to be spit back out and start the process all over again.

“I didn’t stay on the island for my kids, Steve.” Danny looks out into the night. “I stayed when it was hard, when it sucked, when I thought one more day in this place would kill me—because of you. Because you were the first person I’ve ever known who made a promise to stick around and actually kept it.”

Steve’s eyes are grim now.

Danny shakes his head. “You had every right and every good reason to leave. Can’t pour from an empty cup and all that. But…you said you’d had enough of crisis and making life and death decisions, that they weighed on you…”

For the first time, Danny is glad of the rain when two warm streaks snake down his cheeks. They get lost somewhere in the mud surrounding them both.

Steve’s chin quivers for a beat, just a breath, and it’s something so unexpected that Danny leans forward on pure instinct. Their hands reach for each other and fail somewhere in the middle, near Danny’s knees.

“That didn’t mean you,” Steve whispers. “You’re not something to run from.”

Danny watches them both dissolve in the rain and wonders when their rucksacks, filled with the indescribable weight of hiding away from each other, will be snipped and ditched on the side of the road too. He sucks in a sharp breath, chest bucking.

“You’re _my_ ghost.” Danny tries to smile and it doesn’t work. “Everywhere in that house, haunting every footstep.”

Steve’s lips are really going at it now, unsteady and all over the place. Danny grieves for Steve’s pain, for his pain, for the endless ways their innocence has been slaughtered.

“I just wanted to grow old…”

“Me too.” Steve huffs. “Don’t you get it? That’s what I wanted too and I couldn’t be there for it with running myself into the ground.”

“Wanted?” Danny asks, heart sinking at the past tense.

Steve doesn’t reply for a moment, his heartbreak noisy and cracking like the thunder.

He hops to his feet with a little, “be right back,” and Danny seriously contemplates if Steve is about to leave him here. Drive away into the night and wash his hands of this frustrating man who’s been by his side for the last ten years. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But Steve jogs back in the time it takes for Danny to blink four times. He’s holding a tall thermos that smells heavenly and a small drawstring bag.

The thermos is shoved into Danny’s hands before he can even ask what it is.

“Drink that—don’t chug.”

“I thought you weren’t giving the orders anymore.”

Steve’s lips do some more acrobatics so Danny unscrews the cap only to find Steve has already done it for him. The chicken noodle soup, steaming hot, goes down like the tears. Tart and perfect.

 _Almost_ perfect—

Danny only gets three swigs of the soup in before it comes surging back up. The force of it takes him by surprise, how he can’t even swallow or breathe while it makes a reappearance. He leans to the side to vomit.

“Whoa, whoa!” Steve shuffles closer, hand near Danny’s shoulder but not quite landing. His eyes bug with alarm. “Take it easy. Slow sips…slow sips…your body’s messed up enough right now.”

He looks like he wants to say something else, more mother henning, but wisely stays quiet. Each cough burns Danny’s throat and he winces.

Once the episode is done, he finds himself panting. Steve refuses to look away from him.

Danny sniffs. “What’s in the bag?”

Steve can’t answer right away, just reading the nuances of Danny’s lined features. His hand again hovers over Danny but doesn’t make contact. Like he isn’t sure he’s allowed. Danny, spent and soul-tired, is not sure if he’s allowed either.

“You are.”

Danny pauses in round two of sipping the soup. “Me?”

“All the times I couldn’t get you to shut up on my trip. Whenever it happened, I’d buy something.”

“I wasn’t even there!”

This doesn’t seem to have stopped Steve—he upends the bag and out comes a bizarre display of trinkets across Danny’s legs, from shells to tourist-style hats to that saltwater taffy. There’s even a pair of socks. Danny sees what’s on them, the little state outline, and a whole _lot_ of streaks run down his face.

“You…” He points to them, getting all wet in his lap. “You actually went to Jersey.”

Steve doesn’t look at them. Apparently Danny is a much more interesting subject, though Steve’s eyes are sad, intent.

“Got a little voice in my head, I realized.”

Danny sets down the soup, eyes blurring. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. He’s about five foot six. Can’t keep his mouth shut, refuses to let me hole up inside my own head. One of the most lavishly compassionate people I’ve ever met. And you know what? I missed him something fierce, more than I could talk my way around. Getting Lou’s call was almost a relief.”

It is Danny who can’t find words this time, shaking in the rain.

“We’re each other’s ghosts.” Steve’s chin starts up again. “Peace is important, and I still need to figure out my own head before I can live, but it doesn’t exist for me without you anymore. _I_ don’t exist anymore without you.”

Danny wipes at his face. “Is this one of those pity speeches people give each other when the person is lying pathetically on the side of the road?”

“What? No, this is not a pity speech.”

And it’s not. Danny can feel it pluming in the air, that this is not a relational problem—this is a _human_ problem, something so fundamental to who they are that it requires digging for its true name.

“Losing my dad…” Steve nudges the thermos and Danny rolls his eyes but keeps drinking. “It was like losing an arm. Then you came along and, well, you handed me a prosthetic limb. I could live again. The future suddenly wasn’t about fighting anymore, no matter how hard I tried to make it.”

“What’s…” The world lurches, and Danny holds his breath. “What was it about?”

Steve scrubs a hand through his hair. “Home.”

Danny looks deep into the anguished eyes and finds that he has no idea how they’re going to dig themselves out of this one. But they’re doing it together. For the first time, Danny has company in this pit.

“And it took me even longer to figure out that home is not a place or job at all. It’s not even my family.”

There’s a taste on the wind, balmy and full of dirt, living micro-organisms of sloughed off fear.

“When Rachel left,” Danny starts, figuring he’s in for a penny on this honesty fest, “I told myself it didn’t matter. That my own happiness didn’t matter so long as my daughter grew up with her father. Then you left and it was the same. So long as you were happy, that loss didn’t matter.”

Danny glances up from the thermos. Steve is trembling too and has somehow snuck closer, close enough that Danny can feel the heat of his hands, where they hover. “We lie to ourselves a lot, don’t we?”

Steve nods. “Yes. We do.”

First touches are important, Danny has learned over the years. First tap of a beer bottle after a case neither expected. First time Grace met Steve on those bleachers and she held his hand. First time Steve touched his soul with that ‘I love you’ before defusing a bomb.

Steve takes the first leap in a visible defeat of the battle against himself, his knuckles brushing along Danny’s jaw. Just a quick stroke.

This shouldn’t be a first touch—it isn’t even the first time Steve has touched him since this disaster of a homecoming—but it is. Though fleeting, that contact stings with electricity, with agony and slicing shards of broken dreams.

It breaks Danny too.

The earnest pain oozing out of Steve, communicated through that simple touch, is why Danny finally cracks. He soaks it in like the rain, that he hasn’t been discarded like last week’s trash. Steve, keyed up to the extreme, launches forward the instant Danny can’t fully catch his breath.

He puts his hands over his eyes but Steve is there anyway, gathering Danny up in cold arms and sobbing in his ear.

“Thought you’d decided I wasn’t worth it anymore.”

“Never.” Steve’s fingers ball up in Danny’s shirt. His messy sobs back-and-forth with the thunder. “Not for a second.”

Danny wants to hit Steve upside the head for making him think so, but it ends up as a tender, relieved gesture. He runs his fingers through the damp hair again, dizzy enough that he has to brace one hand on the ground or he’ll throw up again. Steve doesn’t seem to like even that tiny loss of contact, picking the limb up so it’s also wrapped around his neck. Danny buries his nose in Steve’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Danno. I shouldn’t have left when I did, the way that I did. I’m so sorry…”

Danny thinks of his own missing limb, of how he made those beach chairs his reason for getting up in the morning. The promise, fragmented, that they’d grow old in them. It would be so easy to push Steve away, to insist that he doesn’t get a do-over.

But the worst decisions are always easy. 

And all he feels is a strange, shivering calm.

“I forgive you, if you’ll forgive me for being so cold about it, for not supporting you like I should have.”

They sit there, mutually falling apart and piecing each other back together again, in the flood for another few minutes. Steve octopuses himself around Danny until they both warm up, rocking. Until Danny can breathe properly.

“We might have one little problem, though.”

Steve pulls back, worried and on the alert. “What’s wrong?”

“Can’t, uh…I don’t think I can stand up.” Danny swallows his pride and it doesn’t burn so much, because this is Steve and they share part of a liver.

“That’s okay.” Steve slings Danny’s arm over his shoulder and hoists him to his feet with absolutely no warning, the jerk. “I’ve had lots of practice hauling you around.”

Danny’s feet melt like ice cream but Steve just keeps walking, holding virtually all of his weight. “If I throw up on you, it’s your fault.”

“Deal.”

The heater in the truck is already blasting by the time Danny gets settled, complete with an itchy wool blanket from the back tucked around his shoulders. There’s even an EMT kit under the seat.

Danny closes his eyes briefly, leaning back against the window. He’s a little scared at the realization that he’s not sure he physically _can_ keep his head upright. For now, the headrest does it for him. Steve musses with the heat settings and a cooler of food, plopping a protein drink in Danny’s lap after loosening the cap for him.

“You came prepared for this manhunt.”

“Yeah, well.” Steve accelerates back onto the highway—not before throwing Danny a reproving look. “My best friend decided to stop eating and sleeping in a bid to, I don’t know, kill himself and then not tell me. I didn’t know what I’d find.”

“Technically I sleep a lot, just not the most restful sleep.”

“I’m _this_ close to taking you to a hospital.”

Danny squints. “Your fingers are touching.”

“Exactly. Don’t start with me.”

The words are short and biting, but the hand that smooths along his hair is not. It’s unsteady, soft, lingering longer than it has to.

Danny smiles.

* * *

“I still hate you a little bit for leaving one week after I’d been tortured and shot. And we need a new ironing board.”

“…Noted.”

* * *

There is rain. 

There is Steve, whose sobs finally quiet once they turn off the highway onto a rural road. The flush on his cheeks directly matches the one returning to Danny’s chilled skin. They leave time itself behind, driving off into an endless carpet of space to just exist without constraint.

“Don’t scare me like that again,” Steve whispers during the drive, over and over and over, though Danny stays silent. His only reply every time it happens is to pet Steve’s wrist where it hasn’t left the nape of Danny’s neck. “Don’t you _ever_ do that again…”

Danny doesn’t quite sleep, but he watches Steve. Steve, wearing new expressions he’s never seen before, peeled open without filter. It makes him look old— _so_ old, antediluvian old—and like a teenager all in the same breath. Grizzled shadows of white and auburn ripple as stubble across Steve’s cheeks. The pair of them become the stars sailors rely on so much, like they’re in a boat instead of a truck, charting an aimless course across the waves.

There is rain. And there is Steve. That’s all Danny needs to know for now.

* * *

Steve parks at the first motel they can find, surprisingly empty for this close to the start of tourist season. It’s got two beds along with a stocked mini fridge so they call this one a win. Even the lingering smell of badly cleaned out smoke isn’t enough to drive them away. Steve barely gets a foot in the door before his phone starts pinging with texts and missed calls. He manages damage control while Danny polishes off the soup and protein drink.

Steve says something about checking his vitals and getting more solid food into him. But as soon as Danny changes into dry, fresh sweats—Steve, unlike Danny, remembered to take his bag from the dead car before leaving—and feels the pillow under his head, sleep reigns.

There is darkness and there is Steve’s off key humming while he putters around the room. The press of his fingers to a pulse point on Danny’s wrist.

Danny sleeps better than he has in months.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was an unexpected batch of feelios to write and I ended up a weepy mess for the end so...feels warning?


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Guess we have a name for it after all.”
> 
> Danny reaches up and twines his fingers through Steve’s. Familiar callouses nestle around his knuckles, ones that have stopped bleeding and killed criminals and held Danny’s heart together. He knows the feel of that hand better than his own name. “Yeah…I guess we do.”

‘There is no difference between you and me,  
It lies beyond our history.  
And if we only take the time to see we’re all we need,  
Just take my hand, and see me as a brother.

Look inside, and you will find—  
Love exists in every kind.’

“There Is An Answer” ~ A Great Big World

“Danny…pssttt… _Danny._ ”

Danny feels carpet under his feet rather than hardwood. Nothing _smells_ right either and he frowns. The air is cold, wafted with a chemical and stale coffee scent.

“Where are you going, bud?”

He’s not going anywhere, obviously. Isn’t it rude to wake a sleeping person? Except…except Danny is much too confused and wobbling to be sleeping flat, on an actual bed. His hand connects with something solid, cold, and he pulls at it.

“Whoa, okay…hey! Not the balcony. Let’s not do that. Fifteen foot drops are not conducive to good health.”

Arms snatch Danny around the waist and what do you know—he doesn’t fight these hands at all. They’re strong, sturdy enough that they press a little uncomfortably against tender spots along Danny’s ribs but careful enough to be reassuring rather than a source of distress.

He lets them turn him to a different trajectory, waking gradually and opening his eyes right at the point where Steve lets go and slides around to face him head on.

“You gonna keel over on me?”

Danny wrestles with a bout of light-headedness. “Steve? You’re here?”

That doesn’t seem right. He’s not awake enough to be sure why, but it doesn’t. It’s been much too empty and colourless the last two months for Steve to be here. He’s dreamt about it, though this is awfully real for a dream.

Steve’s face shutters. His voice gentles and shutters along with it. “Yeah, Danno, I’m here. In the flesh and jet lagged out of my mind. I’ve never seen you do that.”

Danny is about to ask what he’s talking about when he realizes he’s standing beside the potted plant next to the balcony’s sliding door. In their motel room. Swaying even while propped up against the wall.

How ‘bout that.

Steve sees his surprise. “It freaked me out to wake up and your bed was empty—then to look over at you wavering like a drunk by the patio door.”

Danny’s hands are cold so he tucks them inside his sleeves. He’s sufficiently awake now, and appreciates that Steve doesn’t step back from his tight hover even though he is. “‘S a fun new habit, I guess. Ta-da.”

“I believed Lou when he told me, obviously…but seeing it up close…”

Steve doesn’t finish his thought, just stares at Danny with some fierce light of consideration. As if Danny is a mystery he can’t or doesn’t want to solve. There’s that old look again, pained and self recriminating, the ancient mariner done telling his tale with no one left to hear. No one but Danny, anyway.

They are rescued from the heavy lilt in Steve’s eyes by Danny’s ankles choosing this moment to check out for the night.

“Going down,” he warns, grunting at the pain of the wall corner digging into his bad shoulder.

“Yeah, okay.” Steve reacts at once and grabs his not-on-fire arm. They make it to Danny’s bed before he completely gives out. Steve gingerly lowers Danny onto the mattress, his fingers a warm anchor in the strange sea of this unfamiliar room. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

Once Danny is under the covers and the world stops spinning like a dreidel, Steve throws another duvet over him. He also holds out two cracker packets that Danny wolfs down, much hungrier than he expected to be. Unlike the soup, these stay down without incident, lulling Danny back into a doze. He hopes he doesn’t wander anymore tonight, that he if he does, Steve won’t let him get on top of the railing.

Only the room’s sudden, suspicious silence alerts him to the fact that something isn’t quite kosher. He pops open one eye.

A dark figure against an even darker background, Steve’s silhouette loiters over the bed.

Danny’s gut warms with a rush of sympathy and understanding. “Siddown, Steve.”

“But there’s—”

Danny wriggles over to one side. “It’s a queen, McGarret. Sit. Down.”

“Suppose you’re skinny enough for it.”

“ _Steve_.”

Steve promptly shuts up and carefully lowers himself down, back against the headboard, though at least he crawls under the covers’ warmth.

“I’ss positively arctic in here,” Danny agrees with this choice.

“Can’t turn the AC off.” Steve shrugs, an action Danny feels in the mattress even with his eyes closed. “It’s a permanent setting on a master control at the front desk.”

Danny savours it, the push of their breathing in a teeter totter, call-response motion. He’s gotten so used to a couch that this is an unheard of amenity. The press of someone else’s ribs nearby is better than any lullaby, the tingling, sometimes painful sensation of a lost limb recently restored where sinews rejoin to dead tissue.

Breathing. What a simple thing to have missed. He didn’t notice how much he depends on the sound and feel of Steve breathing at his side until it went away.

Danny is just on the cusp of sleep when his mouth moves without his brain’s input—

“They say co-dependence isn’t healthy.”

Steve is silent for so long that Danny doesn’t think he’ll answer at all. He’s breathing faster, the bed creaking while he shifts to peer down at Danny. A whole universe of possible shut downs and sniping deflections are birthed and die in that five minute pause. They might still be in that boat, sailing away to a world only they inhabit.

“Screw what other people say,” Steve announces suddenly. “They just don’t have a word for what they don’t understand.”

“Is that so? We’ll have to find a name for it, then.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

Danny is amused now, grinning into his pillow. “Looking forward to it. They might be right, you know, that this isn’t textbook and not exactly a helpful thing.”

“Just because someone’s bond doesn’t fit in a checked box?”

“No,” Danny says patiently. He shifts around, until his nose is mushed into Steve’s thigh. Much more comfortable. “Because we’ve put all our chips into one pot. We can’t function being separated for longer than a week.”

There Steve goes again with the contemplative silences. He’s turning into a Victorian anti hero at this rate. His thumb has resumed its mellow circles on Danny’s temple. Danny definitely nods off sometime in the brooding intermission and only wakes when Steve sniffs. They inhale in a synchronous motion.

“Do you regret it?” Steve whispers. “After all the sacrifices you’ve had to make and all the times you’ve been hurt because of me?”

“That goes both ways.”

“Yeah, but do you _regret_ it?”

“Not for a moment.” Danny answers without a microsecond of hesitation.

“Good. Me neither.”

Danny resists laughing to avoid any possible hurt on Steve’s feelings. Still, he can’t resist a little sarcasm. “Just so we’ve cleared that up.”

“Danny?”

“Mm?”

Steve breathes out through his mouth, noisy and tired. In a release of tension all throughout his body, he slouches down further. The elliptical of his hand stops moving. Its static tingle continues fuzzing across Danny’s skin.

“When we met were kinda the same, you know?”

Danny opens his eyes, although he doesn’t see much beyond the dark fabric of the duvet. “How do you figure?”

“We’d both just moved to the island, both just lost someone important to us. Both trying to hold onto a life we thought represented our future.”

Somewhere out in the night, a bird calls and though there’s no moon, Steve is a golden sun all by himself. The mini fridge hums. One window is open a crack, enough to hear wind teasing palm leaves and the way they sigh along with Steve. Slowly, just a little, Danny starts to reflect that light, his chest glowing.

“Foxhole love.”

Steve’s breathing suspends.

“That’s what my grandfather used to call it,” Danny insists. “Soldiers bonding over blood and seeing things no one else ever would. The kind of fealty you can’t break.”

He pretends not to feel the way their room has suddenly started raining, the tiny droplets that get lost in his hair. They’re warm, brand new. Infant forms of self expression from old eyes. It strikes him, again, how much this whole experience must have frightened Steve too.

“My feet were looking for it, I think.” Danny can feel Steve’s heartbeat along the bridge of his nose, strong and fast just like his arms. “Wandering all over the island for that missing limb. I couldn’t _find_ you…but then you found me.”

“Guess we have a name for it after all.”

Danny reaches up and twines his fingers through Steve’s. Familiar callouses nestle around his knuckles, ones that have stopped bleeding and killed criminals and held Danny’s heart together. He knows the feel of that hand better than his own name. “Yeah…I guess we do.”

* * *

The drive home, especially as they checked out at a ridiculous hour of the morning, should only take a few hours or so but Steve milks it for longer than he has to, going the long way around and finding lots of backwoods trails to wade through. And all the while he keeps stopping for food and making Danny eat every single crumb of it. Burgers. Salads. Some weird squid thing with pickle juice on it.

“This is getting ridiculous. I feel like a balloon.”

Steve stands his ground. “I talked with your doctor before we left the motel and he said smaller meal portions every two hours are the best thing to boost your sugar and blood pressure levels back up. Once you stop looking like a shrimp prong, you can eat normally.”

Danny would normally complain about being bossed around, but he’s too relieved.

“He also recommended…um…” Steve waves a hand, and Danny can tell by the tried and true gesture that he’s trying to be delicate about something and is about to fail miserably. “There’s a medication we can buy, if the sleepwalking continues.”

His eyes immediately dart to Danny, as if waiting for him to blow up or cry or throw said pickle squid out the window.

Danny doesn’t know how to feel, just that more than anything—he wants this to last. He’s not ready for this cradled span of time to collapse in on itself. However long he gets Steve, he needs to make it feel like a mini-forever. Needs to power up before his sun dips away. 

“Okay,” he says, mostly to stop Steve’s polygraph stare. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

At times, Danny dozes, but Steve doesn’t seem to mind. He just keeps driving, looping around the same block or stopping to take a picture of some colourful bird in the trees.

“Got a proposition for you,” he declares later, at lunch.

Danny pauses with a lemonade straw halfway to his lips. “That’s a little bold. We barely know each other.”

“You wanna hear it or not?”

“Shoot. Lay it on me.”

Steve fidgets in the driver’s seat, actually _fidgets_ , and Danny gives him full attention. Anything that has dive-headlong-into-every-situation Steve nervous or childishly excited is worth the extra effort.

“So I got a call from Sam in Los Angeles.”

“Your SEAL buddy?”

Steve nods. “I phoned him up to chat at one point while in Africa and after hearing what’s going on with…everything, he mentioned that Hetty has an empty property she never uses anymore. Been vacant for years.”

“Hetty? As in _the_ Henrietta Lange?”

“Never met her. Does she live up to the legend?”

Danny thinks back to the trip he and Chin took for a case. “And more, let me tell you. That woman isn’t a force to be reckoned with—she _is_ the reckoning. You want to rent a house from Hetty?”

Steve tilts his head, brow quirked. His voice is hushed, for a reason Danny can’t figure out. Almost as if he’s trying not to spook a rare animal back into its natural habitat. “No, Danny. She wants to give us the house, free of charge.”

Danny nearly spills lemonade all over his lap. His eyes are huge. “Are you kidding me? She wants to just…just hand you the keys to a fully functioning house? In Los Angeles’ abysmal housing market?”

“Right on the water,” Steve confirms. His hand stretches around the stick to brush Danny’s arm, because he can and they’re both still a little touchy about what happened last night, quite literally. “Two stories and four bedrooms, no furniture, but a full culinary kitchen and private beach.”

“You’ve already been there to check it out.”

“Yep. I told her I’d think about it.”

“What’s the catch? Why that face?”

Steve looks over at Danny with his lie detector gaze again, mouth opening and closing a few times before he threads the right words together. “The house was designed and built to be a halfway house for soldiers and agents coming home from traumatic experiences, who need to get their heads on straight. A safe house, let’s call it.”

“But it remained empty, never got inhabited by those agents?”

Steve hesitates. “No. Something…hindered that plan.”

Danny senses the dark, lurking shadow of a tragic story in there but doesn’t press. The sentiment rings over his head after a beat, and he sinks deeper into his seat. “Like us.”

“Yeah…like us.” Steve’s voice is nearly muted now. “Hetty said she was glad it could be used for its intended purpose, instead of being sold off to a resort company. Her only proviso is that we each go to therapy to sort through all the horrors we’ve lived through and keep a bed free in case an agent ever needs a place to crash. Maybe consult on a case once in a while.”

They pass through a tunnel, and the literal darkness matches the one inside Danny’s head, all the memories he’s pushed away for so long. Facing them is a daunting task he can’t even begin to fathom.

“Be honest with me, Danny: do you still want to be a cop, going out every day on this job? Because if you do, I’ll respect—”

“No.”

Steve dangerously takes his eyes off the road again. “No?”

“Absolutely not.” Danny’s ribs spike with phantom pain. “Something about this time, Steve, getting shot…the job will just hammer those nails into the coffin for good.”

They both sober at that one simple word. One of Steve’s hands tightens around the wheel and the other tightens around Danny’s forearm. “I should have taken you with me in the first place. We both need to get away, not just me.”

“Maybe.”

“I can work with maybe, if you’re willing to try.”

Danny rolls his head to study the hopeful glint on Steve’s face. “Of course I am. Gotta get a return on my investment. Besides, I’d be closer to Grace. Win-win, really.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you said that.” Steve reaches over Danny’s legs and flicks open the glove compartment. “Because I already bought us two plane tickets while I was at the airport.”

Danny huffs in wonderment, taking the envelopes. “What if I said no?”

“I knew you wouldn’t.” Steve smiles. “Although I’m surprised you agreed to this so _quickly_. Are you sure you’re okay with leaving Charlie behind?”

A slow smile, peppered with a hidden note of something thrilled, creeps over Danny’s face. He feels like he’s about to hand a kid a much-requested Christmas present. “Actually, last time Rachel and I talked, she mentioned that they’re planning to move back to the mainland. Something about a job offer.”

He hears rather than sees the hair on Steve’s head scuff along the seat when he swivels to stare at Danny. Danny feels this one too, boring into the side of his head. “Are you serious?”

“As a funeral.”

“Danny, that’s awesome!”

“I didn’t think so at first, but now I’m coming around.”

The hand returns yet again, patting Danny’s shoulder, then squeezing it, then kneading out some of the residual tension along the bullet scar.

“Danny?”

He taps the hand on his shoulder. “Steven?”

Steve doesn’t catch the deadpan humour. Instead he nods, though Danny isn’t sure what for, especially since Danny hasn’t done anything noteworthy except almost die and then weep with this stupid, loving man in the rain and agree to move into a free house with said stupid man. Neither of them is exactly winning best communicator or best friend of the year here.

But after Steve’s done nodding and doing all that thinking, he wipes at his eye. A quick swipe with his thumb Danny probably wasn’t supposed to see. “I’m just really glad to be driving on a sunny day with you, in Hawaii, both of us relatively fine. Just really awed. Humbled.”

An easy joke plods towards Danny’s tongue but for some reason, this time he bites it back. This time a joke would feel blasphemous.

“I’m glad too,” is all he says.

“Thank you.” Steve’s whispering now. “For giving me a second chance.”

“They seem to be making the rounds. We’ve built our whole lives on second chances—why stop now?”

* * *

When they pull up at the McGarrett house, finally, the whole team is there. Beaming, ecstatic, and far more pleased than they should be. Danny barely opens his door before Tani is already lecturing and Adam is scolding him for scaring them and Lou cries some more for good measure. All of it over top of each other, of course, with absolutely no finesse. Adam says much the same thing as Steve did last night, barking at him that he should never do something so idiotic like that under any circumstances ever again. 

Steve accepts the hugs but mostly seems to enjoy watching them badger Danny.

“What about the house? What about _Eddie_?” Danny asks, once he’s free from the inquest and comments on how wiped he looks.

Steve pulls out a set of keys and throws them to Junior, now with his arm around Tani. Junior catches them with his bandaged hand. “It’s yours, man. One good deed deserves another. Though you should have called me sooner.”

“Yeah,” Lou admits. “We should have.”

Junior doesn’t look shocked or overwhelmed by this news, revealing that they probably talked about it before Steve ran all over the island looking for Danny. He smiles, something grateful and bright in his eyes.

“I’ll take good care of it, Steve.”

Steve points to the house. “Go fill it with new memories, a new family. Fill it with love and you’ve already done me proud.”

Danny sees Lou coming in for another hug and intercepts.

“Good for you, diving in,” says Lou, voice thick.

“Have to leave the shore sometime, right?” Danny rubs his shoulder. “I still have no idea what that means, by the way.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

When he steps back, Quinn rolls over two suitcases, already packed to bursting with his clothes, mementos, and books.

Danny begins to see how well thought out this was long before he clued in. Perhaps last night on the phone, now that he thinks back. “Wait. We’re leaving as in like…today?”

“No, Danno.” Steve props an elbow on his good shoulder. “We’re leaving as in _right now_.”

Dazed, drenched in the possibility of it all, Danny hugs Adam, Quinn, and then Tani. Even Eddie gets in the love with some ear scritchies and a belly rub. Danny’s not sure his feet are touching the ground at all.

“Go find a little rest,” Tani whispers, before stepping back.

“You saved my life,” he replies, heavy, nodding as his eyes make the rounds. “Thank you, all of you.”

The sun is touching the horizon by the time they say their goodbyes, promising to write and call, enduring the retiree and old people jokes. For the second time in under a week, Danny watches the house shrink away in a rear view mirror.

“Am I even cleared to fly?”

To his credit, Steve actually thinks this over before answering. His eyes do another scan of Danny’s shoulder and torso. “It’s a short flight and we’ll land in time for a late dinner. I don’t think the air pressure will hurt you any.”

“I can’t believe we’re doing this.” Danny plays with the scar on his wrist. “We’re really doing this.”

Steve’s voice is thick too. “Neither can I.”

“Are we crazy?”

“Probably.”

“Good,” Danny decides. “That means we have a shot at getting through this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I didn't show a lot of the team's reactions or have an elaborate going away moment but I figured since the show did that quite well, I wouldn't mess with a good thing. Maybe someday I'll write a piece where they visit LA and have a sappy time together. :)


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny leans back and Steve’s chin digs into his shoulder. Their breathing matches the waves.
> 
> “I think…I think we’re going to be okay.”
> 
> “Yeah?”
> 
> “Yeah. I really do.”

‘And his tears ran down to the river  
And the river ran down to the sea  
And the sea turned into an ocean  
And the ocean is you and me.’

“Forever Light Will Shine” ~ Alan Doyle

It turns out that two suitcases isn’t nearly enough luggage to store all of Danny’s things, but he receives profuse promises from Tani while texting her in the terminal that the team will ship the rest of his and Steve’s belongings over later, once the pair has settled in. Assuming that this works. Assuming it lasts. Danny isn’t sure, but he promised Steve he’d try and he intends to follow through.

He’s torn from his musings by Steve giving him the most wonder-struck look before take off.

Danny drops into the aisle seat. “What?”

“Just…” Steve hardly blinks, staring at Danny like he’s seen a ghost. He leans up against the window, skin tired and grey, eyes moist. “Déjà vu.”

“…Déjà vu? About me sitting down?”

“Nothing.” Steve waves his own explanation away. “Never mind.”

More than used to his partner’s strange tics, Danny shrugs. They buckle up and sit in comfortable silence, the silence of two people who don’t need talking to communicate. So Danny stops overthinking it and just enjoys the warmth of Steve’s arm against his, the sprawl of his long legs, the way he can’t seem to stop smiling.

Watching Hawaii fade away out the window is definitely one of those moments Danny figured Steve would be more emotional about, but he looks _lighter._ Danny is shocked to his core by the way he half closes the shade and looks away.

“Going to miss your home?” he has to ask.

Steve shakes his head, tapping Danny’s toe with his own. “I already am home.”

Danny blinks and Steve holds his arm, and it’s another one of those deferred moments burned into Danny’s mind for life. The words themselves sear across his chest, branded there in a way he can’t quite fathom. It compounds the wooziness of take off.

They barely make it to cruising altitude before Steve’s eyes shut for a few seconds too long. This is not exactly unexpected, with Steve’s crash of worry-induced adrenaline and jet lag, coupled with the lack of sleep he got in the motel last night, just sitting up while Danny slept to catch him whenever he tried to get up—but the speed of it is.

Danny is reading a surfing magazine the seat’s previous owner left in the pocket and he glances up when Steve’s head slumps against the window shade.

His aimless flipping halts.

It’s his turn to stare, to puzzle over how just fifteen minutes of buzzing engines could be such an effective lullaby. Having lived in hostile environments, Steve usually sleeps stiffly, jaw clenched shut and one ear tilted to hear the world around him, even when down for the count.

But now his mouth is open a little, fingers lax on his leg, the way he only does when he’s completely wiped and feels safe enough to let his guard down. Even his shoulders droop somewhat. Danny has only seen him sleep like this a handful of times over the years. The whole thing is just as melting as his first experience with it ten years ago, when Steve slipped off into dream land during a stake out.

They pass through some turbulence, just a minute of pond-skipping vibration, and Steve’s equally lax knee knocks into Danny’s. There’s no need to hide a smile, since Steve can’t even see him, but Danny tries anyway. No success. The sloppy teenager portrait of it all is just endearing enough that his chest aches for the youth Steve never really got to be. His ribs ache a touch as well, from the pressure of take off.

He’d made sure not to tell Steve that one.

And for thirty-five minutes, the world is perfectly banal. The kind of banal that makes Danny want to cry for abstruse reasons he refuses to investigate further. Though he reads that surfing magazine cover to cover, none of it sticks with him like the simple, rumpled sight of Steve sleeping. His stubbly chin. His even breaths—

Steve’s chest stutters.

Danny sits straighter at once. He isn’t even aware that he’s been tracking its steady pattern until it falters. He scrabbles to unclip the seatbelt without taking his eyes off Steve’s face.

His increasingly distressed face.

To anyone who doesn’t know Steve, distress might seem like a strong word. It’s just some twitching around the brackets of his forehead and the tensed muscles of his cheek and mouth. They flutter when he moans, so low even Danny wouldn’t have heard it if he wasn’t turned sideways in his seat and staring right at him. Nothing big or over the top. No burst into tears or shouting.

Danny knows better, however, even before Steve’s hands join the restless parade. He’s seen this quiet kind of struggle before, the blank pain poorly hidden.

“Hey.” He squeezes Steve’s wrist. Partly to ground Steve but also to stop their defensive stirring along his knees. “You’re on a plane with me, Steve. It’s all good.”

Steve doesn’t wake. If anything, he twitches harder, brow pulled low now. Danny has to work to keep his grip, though his kind tone doesn’t indicate this.

“Steve, babe. You’re— _we’re_ safe, I promise. Just open your eyes for me.”

When this fails, Danny’s hand moves to his bicep—no luck—and then up to his shoulder, where it meets his neck. There’s no response for a moment, and Danny goes in for a pound by pressing at the taut muscles. Steve twitches once more, this one surprised more than in imagined pain.

And his eyes slowly blink open, a blush returning to the blanched skin.

They don’t dart around, as they’re prone to when clocking an unfamiliar environment, instead looking at the window and then at Danny. This is a behaviour Danny has never seen before, oddly enough. Steve never fails to be full of surprises, even after all these years. He looks…disoriented? Painfully relieved? It’s hard to tell.

Danny doesn’t talk right away, just continues the faint neck massage. He fights to keep any worry off his face.

Steve swallows. Once. Twice…

“Danno?”

“In the flesh,” Danny parrots Steve’s words from last night. Rather than leaning back, Steve’s hesitant voice propels him closer, so that he’s leaned forward almost until his elbow hits Steve’s knee. “Which one was it this time?”

Steve is silent. From somewhere behind them a little girl starts singing along to a track on her headphones. The drinks cart is already starting to rattle through the aisles. Danny can also hear but doesn’t look at the distant sounds of a baby crying.

With no answer forthcoming, Steve flicks his eyes at the flight attendant on her way. A silent question of whether Danny wants to move back before this delicate little moment is seen by someone else.

Danny doesn’t move. His eyes burn and he shakes his head. This is their new normal and he’s not ashamed of it.

Another swallow, rippling against Danny’s thumb. “It was my…Doris. Again.”

Danny is silent this round, though he moves his hand back down to Steve’s wrist.

“You were there. In the dream.”

“Oh well.” Danny feigns a smile. “If you’re worried about me making cameos in your dream then you shouldn’t have asked me to buy a place with you.”

It’s a wide open statement, a barn door just begging to be hit. He waits for the offered snark in return—“ _We didn’t_ buy _it, Danny. We’re not paying for a cent._ ”—but Steve just drags a shaky hand down his eyes.

“She shot you, Danno.”

Danny’s grip tightens. “No, she didn’t. I’m right here mostly in one piece, see? Just like I told you. You had a nightmare and that’s that.”

Steve finally makes actual, normal human eye contact, apparently bolstered enough that he feels safe doing so. Danny immediately wishes he hadn’t, with the guilt oozing out of him. This look is practically Steve’s go to and it’s loathsome in its fluency.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” says Danny, his voice equally tight rather than accusing. “How long?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how long has it been since you slept a full, consecutive eight hours?”

There’s an ominous pause. Steve’s eyes are haunted. “Since…even before you got taken and I left Hawaii.”

Danny swears under his breath, angry at the injustice of it all. How hard they’ve fought all these years only to find out there are some things a gun and a badge can’t fix. That this type of love, hard won, is exactly what they need but they realized it so late.

Steve snorts a laugh, for more esoteric reasons Danny doesn’t want to investigate. “We’re both a little messed up in the head, huh?”

“Pal.” Danny’s blank tone doesn’t match his empathetic eyes. “If you’re just starting to figure that out about yourself, I pity you. We all knew ages ago.”

“Is that so?”

“Eons, Steve.”

Unlike Danny, this smile of Steve’s is real, however fleeting. “It’s kind of poetic, in an awful, ironic way, when you think about it: I couldn’t sleep for the life of me while travelling the world’s oceans, especially whenever I stopped somewhere, and you…”

“And I slept a lot,” Danny finishes. “While travelling around in the dead of night.”

“Poetic,” says Steve again.

This harmonized back and forth, even half a globe apart from each other, stings deep inside Danny’s core. Or perhaps it was the result of a complete _lack_ of synchronicity, their lives discordant after being built upon each other for so long. To Danny’s horror, tears burn across the back of his eyes. He blinks to get rid of them.

“Steve?”

Something of his own compound of emotions must leak through because Steve’s brow dips low again. “Danny?”

There’s a hush in the word. It matches the one inside Danny’s spirit, however much this mutual concern party shows no signs of stopping. He’s never heard Steve say his name like that, like it is a pearl on a velvet pillow and he can’t drop it. Danny tears up in earnest.

He opens his mouth, wanting to say what he couldn’t to Adam on the couch that night. For once in Danny Williams’ life—words don’t come. His tongue is empty, completely void of what he needs to say.

But those hard won ten years have their reward. Steve’s eyes scan Danny’s face, every last inch of it, and something in his own clears. He can read the words where they plead from Danny’s eyes.

“I’m not leaving again,” Steve whispers. “We both need help, a lot of it, but we’ll figure it out together. Like we should have from the beginning. You can be honest with me and I won’t run off with it. I’m _here._ ”

Danny closes his eyes, unable to speak. Neither can Steve, which must be why he settles for taking Danny’s hand and lifting it to his own chest, just over his heart. Danny savours the clean _th-thump_ of Steve’s heartbeat pattering against his fingertips.

“You’re a big sap,” he gasps out. He can _feel_ Steve’s answering grin. “You know that?”

“I learned from the best.”

Danny’s fingers clench in Steve’s shirt. “Home.”

“Yeah, Danno— _home_.”

And they don’t move for a long time, so long in fact that the flight attendant takes one look at them and skips their seats entirely. Steve smiles at her while stroking Danny’s hand.

Danny sits back, once they’re both composed enough. “I’m guessing you don’t want to sleep?”

Steve shakes his head, truly ragged now. “I don’t even want to _try_.”

“I don’t blame you.”

The flight attendant discreetly winds her way back to their seats and Steve, seeing how woozy Danny still is from air pressure and lack of food, manages to sweet talk her into two packs each. Steve makes Danny eat three of them, with only one bag of pretzels for himself. Danny tries to share, but one thunderous glare later and he polishes them off.

“Ah man.” When Steve digs his phone out of his pocket, the battery is dead. “I thought I could at least watch a movie to stay awake.”

Something sizzles through Danny’s stomach, something bubbling and the opposite of that persistent ache. Like he’s broiling from the inside out with the humour, joy, of it all. A summer’s day that has never really faded since Steve hugged him on the side of the road.

He queues up a download on his phone, courtesy of Tani. “Have you ever heard of a movie called _Sleepover_?”

Steve squints at him. “No.”

“Excellent—now _there’s_ some quality skateboarding…”

* * *

Their new house is far bigger than Danny ever imagined. Steve unlocks the side door and opens it, though neither move right away. A fresh wind blows at them from inside the foyer and Danny loses his breath. _Home._

Steve holds out his arm. “After you.”

So Danny takes the first step inside—and immediately decides that watching Steve drop his bags to the floor is his favourite sight from now on. The permanence implied in it is stunning.

Danny calls dibs on the first floor bedroom, mainly because stairs are still hell to climb on his old, re-aggravated ACL injury. Steve claims the upstairs loft, but they both know that won’t last long. Someone thought to get them an overstuffed couch and little else, though a notice says more furniture has been ordered and is in on its way.

“Look at that. It’s even got a nice stove.”

“What’s your point?” Danny narrows his eyes at Steve in confusion and no small amount of suspicion.

He smiles back, the cheeky brat. “So you can make me pancakes.”

“Oh really? You think I’m going to be the one doing any cooking around here?”

“Why stop a good thing?”

“You, sir, are an animal. Not that there was any doubt.”

“I’ll take that as a resounding yes.”

Steve, naturally, zips all the way through the open concept kitchen and living room to the full wall of glass windows at the back as soon as he possibly can. A set of wooden steps leads down to a beach brimming with white, flour-like sand. It’s less golden, desaturated, and thinner than Danny is used to after all these years. Silky grasses brush at his toes.

The ocean smells the same and brand new, all at once. This is the exact same body of water and they haven’t hopped across it very far but it’s a new place, and that hybrid lowers Danny’s shoulders away from his ears.

“Hold up.” Steve shades his eyes to see farther down the pathway.

“What are you looking at?”

“There’s something there that wasn’t before, when I visited last week.”

Danny follows Steve, even when he picks up the pace and lopes down to the shore. Oddly, Steve careens to an abrupt halt and freezes there. Worry jumps into Danny’s stomach. He hurries as fast as his injuries will allow, bemused about what they’ll find. It can’t possibly be something sinister, not on their first night here.

“Steve? _Steve_.”

Danny makes it Steve’s side and stops dead too. The two men can only gape, openly, for a beat:

There, side by side, are two brand new white Adirondack chairs. Taped to the arm of one is a handwritten note on red stationary. Steve opens it and grins, turning the paper so Danny can read too—

‘ _A gift and a promise, H._ ’

It’s the word that hits him first. Promise. _Promise_. 

“That’s really nice of her, especially after I told Sam about our usual…Danno?” Steve’s voice rises with alarm when the wind whips two tears away from Danny’s face. He grabs at Danny’s shoulder. “Hey, you okay?”

Danny gestures helplessly at the chairs, at the waves, at the entire portrait of this second chance. “No! We still get to grow old on a beach. We still…”

He can’t finish, throat wadded up with emotion that he doesn’t care if Steve sees anymore. His nose is running and even on the side of the road last night he didn’t cry this much. It is a resplendent, earth rumbling fact that Danny doesn’t know if he’s ever been this content in his entire life. The boulders under his feet stop moving.

They _stop moving_ , and in this moment, at last, so does Danny.

“Yeah,” says Steve slowly. Processing what it all means. “We do. Not the same beach, but that future’s still there.”

Danny laughs some more, tears mixing with the salt water at their toes, and so Steve does the only logical thing left—

Which is to shove Danny in a chair and sit beside him until the last of the sun sets.

* * *

Some memories form instantly, with absolutely no warning.

In Danny’s experience, these are rarely moments of profound clarity and weight. Never the big speeches or inflated gestures. No, it is the commonplace things one remembers most, when the lights go out and man is left alone with his filing cabinet of experiences to flip through. Sunshine off the river when fishing with his father the first time. The smell of familiar aftershave. Grace giggling at a flock of ducks.

He’s stuck in a memory loop right now, the feeling of a bullet hitting him just above his heart. The slam of his body onto the floor. It’s wet, not just on his chest, but all across his face, down his heaving diaphragm, running warm and torrid along the hollow of his neck.

“Danny, it’s okay. No one’s going to hurt you. I gotcha, it’s okay.”

He doesn’t realize he’s hyperventilating until soft hands thumb blood away from his cheeks and…oh.

“Hosp’tal?”

“No, Danny. We’re at home.”

More wetness on his cheeks.

Then a body is climbing behind him, caging him in with bent knees, folding a calloused hand over his own. Danny’s hiccuping stomach punches their tangled fingers up and up-down. The other hand grabs Danny’s and plants it on the wood of the chair beneath them, rocking slightly until Danny recognizes he’s not being shot over and over again. That he got rescued. That he didn’t die after all.

Danny opens his eyes and a new memory forms in an instant:

Above him, bright freckles of stars twinkle and pulse in time with Steve’s heartbeat against his spine. He can feel each breath in Steve’s chest, every twitch of his lips where they rest in Danny’s hair.

“S’eve?” he breathes.

Steve’s arms cinch. “I’m here, Danny. Not going anywhere.”

Danny wonders how he’s not still bleeding when suddenly the warmth blossoming across his back makes sense. It’s not an exit wound at all. Another round of Steve’s tears gets lost somewhere along Danny’s skin. Their breathing slows down by increments, though they’re both trembling.

“St…” Danny swallows hot bile, still weak after so long without eating properly. He doesn’t like that he can’t see Steve’s face. “Steve?”

Steve shifts, upset by the fearful quality in Danny’s voice. He clears his throat, body shifting. Then the chest under Danny’s shoulder blades starts to buzz.

“ _Have you been half asleep, and have you heard voices? I’ve heard them calling my name…_ ”

The words are quiet at first, so quiet Danny almost doesn’t hear them.

His breath catches, completely stops, and he knows he’ll take this sound to his grave. That even if he somehow loses his mind and never knows how to speak again, that this moment, this beautiful memory, will be the last thing he knows. He doesn’t dare talk for fear of stopping it.

Steve’s thumb taps out the beat on Danny’s knuckles. “ _Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors? The voice might be one and the same…_ ”

This tender song goes on for another minute, bungled verses stitched together like Steve is making up some of the words on the spot. His singing voice is like a handful of cake, mushed and goopy and soft, grainy with emotion and sleep.

A fresh wave of tears courses down Danny’s cheeks, but this time it’s through a smile. He feels in danger of bursting, an explosion of all the love zapping through his veins. He could climb mountains if asked, swim this ocean from end to end. Steve doesn’t stop until he feels the last of Danny’s fear ebb.

When the song tapers off, they sit statue still.

“You with me now?” Steve whispers. “You fell asleep in your chair and started whimpering. Was it about the shooting?”

A full body shudder assaults Danny. Steve’s hand immediately switches so it’s resting over the bullet scar. The phantom feel of blood dissipates in an instant, replaced by the warmth of Steve’s palm. Even though Danny is awake, Steve doesn’t stop rocking, their feet burrowed in the sand. Wind rustling the grass. A bright slice of moonlight overhead.

Danny has an astonished question of his own, once he gets his breath back. “Did you just sing me a Muppets song?”

The rocking halts. “Is it? I heard it on a Carpenters album, years ago.”

“Figures you wouldn’t know the most iconic Kermit the Frog song of all time. I have so many things to make you watch. You deserve a childhood, even in your forties.”

Steve smiles into his shoulder. “Sounds fun, but only if it includes a _ThunderCats_ marathon.”

“See?” Danny grouses, still grinning. “No taste. You’re lucky I came along to fix that.”

“Yes, yes I am…”

Danny isn’t stupid enough to think they’re magically cured, that healing is an instant process. He recognizes now that the nightmare was borne of that same fear, his inability to grasp that maybe he’s allowed to be happy. But for the first time he believes it will work. That it’s possible, that they deserve better—together.

“ _Danno_! Look, look, look, look—”

Danny jumps a little at Steve’s giddy voice. It’s so unexpected in this quiet, fragile moment that his heart skips a few beats. Still, he allows his head to be turned towards the left. At first he doesn’t notice anything, just some white blobs and dark grasses flapping in the wind…

Abruptly, what he’s seeing hits him in a rush. Danny gasps, letting Steve hold him still so they don’t scare the hatchlings away.

Because there, flopping out of their eggs, a nest the two men didn’t even see where it’s hidden among the sand, is a little troupe of sea turtles. They wriggle and drag themselves towards the waves, not even a hand’s breadth past Steve’s foot. Their palm-sized shells glisten in the moonlight.

Mouths open, hearts pounding, Danny and Steve watch the tiny babies start their new lives. The first turtle hits a skiff of foam and quickens his pace. Flailing becomes swimming, small yet powerful strokes carrying them away to their home, the place where they belong. An instinct of genetic memory and the ocean’s pull.

“That’s a christening if I’ve ever seen one,” says Steve, voice a wobbly wreck. “Can’t get a better omen than that.”

“Hey, Steve?”

He apparently can’t reply, too enraptured by this whole experience. Danny knows they should probably go inside and get some real sleep, but something about the sanctity of this moment keeps him boneless in the chair. Danny leans back and Steve’s chin digs into his shoulder. Their breathing matches the waves.

“I think…I think we’re going to be okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I really do.”

Steve squeezes their hands. “Me too.”

* * *

Closes his eyes, and there is only the living room.

Opens them:

And for the first time in almost seventy days, Danny wakes up in the exact same place he fell asleep.

Danny blinks down at Steve, on the floor in a sleeping bag, from his lazy curl on the couch. The room is warm already with the start of sun through the panorama windows. Steve must have gotten up earlier at some ungodly hour of the morning, with the smell of coffee curling lazily over their heads from the kitchen.

Steve himself has never looked so relaxed in the years Danny’s ever known him, features loose, legs haphazard, arms drooped onto the floor. It is a suspended moment, the beginning of a lot of those moments to come, where they’re allowed to just be, to exist in a state of freedom from pain.

Danny smiles and closes his eyes to drift off again, knowing they’ll both still be there when he wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have one more chapter left, a 'little' epilogue (ha), mainly because the scene ideas keep multiplying like rabbits. But I wanted this to be the official end and hopefully closure on all the struggles they've been through in this fic.


	9. Epilogue (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re really not going to try it?”
> 
> Danny smirks and takes another swig.
> 
> “Unbelievable,” Steve mutters. “Are you just going to sit there and watch me trip?”
> 
> “Yup.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After I finished this story and laid my head peacefully down to sleep, content in its completed plot arc, the muse _poofed_ awake at the midnight witching hour like, ‘hey! Want a bunch of random crap scenes for this fic?’ And I went, ‘No! Absolutely not. We are done this story. Kaput.’
> 
> Brain: Great! Lemme just—*Beams eight thousand more words of Danny-and-Steve-are-one-big-sappy-family directly into my mind.*
> 
> I now dump them here in a bid to get my brain to shut up. Enjoy!

‘It’s the way you’re smiling at me,  
It’s in the way you hold my hand…  
And I don’t know what it is,  
But I have never known a love like this.’

“Love Like This” ~ Ben Rector

When all the furniture finally gets delivered, even after they arrange it to fit their tastes, Steve puts both hands on his hips and frowns.

“What?” Danny looks around, wondering if they forgot an essential item.

“It’s missing something.”

“Are you touched in the head? What more could we possibly want?”

Steve wanders through the living room before stopping at the windows. “I’m telling you, it doesn’t feel right yet.”

Only two mini palm trees grow on their property, angled tightly together along the left side of the wooden steps that lead down to the beach. So, of course, Steve goes out that very afternoon to buy a hammock and tie it up between them, complete with a woven blanket laid across the bottom to cushion it.

It’s Danny’s new favourite spot. Close enough to the beach to hear the lather of waves and shaded the right amount to be soothing.

He lays there now, curled up on his right side and wilted with fatigue. Today’s latest physical therapy session—part of a strict schedule Steve implemented when he found out how much Danny had been skimping, back in Hawaii—coupled with yesterday’s psychologist session has left him feeling like he weighs a thousand pounds. He’s not sure he could move even if he wanted to. His side pulls with each heavy breath. They’re supposed to have a watch party with Tani tonight, and he hopes he has enough energy for it.

Seagulls chatter overhead, a steady stream of nonsense to match the jumble inside Danny’s head. There’s just enough patchwork sun falling on Danny’s cheek through the leaves that he is comforted by it rather than irritated or burned.

Their patio door slides open, followed by the clop of boots on wood. The sun disappears suddenly behind a shadow, but it doesn’t really, and Danny’s lips twitch.

Steve stands over him for a minute longer without saying anything, apparently satisfied that Danny is just tired. To be fair, they’ve had more than one instance of Steve panicking at Danny’s absence, sensitive to a relapse of the sleepwalking, only to find him conked out in the hammock because he forgot to go inside.

A boot settles carefully by Danny’s chest on the mesh rope. Danny doesn’t open his eyes, confused but trusting whatever weirdness Steve is doing this time. It’s motionless for a moment, with just enough pressure to test the hammock’s give.

Then the boot _pushes_. Gently at first, gaining momentum. Danny wonders, wild at first, if Steve is going to knock him out of it or push him over to make room. Maybe he’s silently teasing him for his obsession with this sleeping spot.

But the boot simply keeps up its swaying back and forth in a consistent pattern, like a cradle. And Danny realizes—Steve is just…rocking him. Because he can.

Back and forth. Not saying a word.

Danny’s eyes prickle and it’s the most honest statement of his life to say he has never loved Steve quite as much as he does right now. A tender tsunami washes across his chest, cresting into something of such monumental affection that it winds him again. Nor has he ever _felt_ more loved.

He opens his eyes only to see the exact same expression on Steve’s face. A soft smile, eyes half narrowed with warmth. Danny reaches out and grasps Steve’s ankle. The boot slows down but doesn’t stop and Danny enjoys how he can feel Steve’s heartbeat under his thumb.

“Do you know what today is?” Steve asks. It sounds rehearsed, probably the same reason he came out looking for Danny in the first place.

Danny runs the date through his brain. Neither of their birthdays, not a sad anniversary or a lost loved one. An obscure holiday perhaps? Is it world sticky bun day or something?

Steve’s big, dopey grin is the first clue.

Danny rolls his eyes. “Are you getting all sappy on me again, McGarrett?”

“I thought that was my job. You cook for me and I help you stop to reflect on life once in a while.”

“That was never the deal.”

“Mmm…pretty sure it was.”

“Then you’ve got too much salt water in your ears, if that’s what you heard.”

“So?” Steve ignores the sassing. He must be excited, for his foot gives a particularly sharp push and Danny actually has to hold onto his ankle or fall out of the hammock. “Know what day it is?”

“You gonna make me say it?”

“Yes.” Steve is dead serious. He pulls his boot out of Danny’s hand, and Danny mourns the loss before Steve kneels down so they’re at eye level. “If you do, I might even have a surprise to commemorate it.”

Danny is too tired and sore for sitting up but his eyes sharpen and he leans back to see Steve’s face in portrait. “You bought me something just to celebrate one month of living here?”

The little dance of sunlight through Steve’s eyes is worth more than anything he can give Danny. Danny relishes it while pretending to sound put upon.

“Maybe. If you’re nice, you can come inside and see it.”

“We’ve gotta get you a hobby, babe. And I can’t _move_ , let alone come inside.”

This sobers Steve a bit, enough that he pokes at Danny’s aching shoulder joint. Whatever he feels, coupled with Danny’s hissed wince, makes his eyes stormy. Danny almost apologizes for putting the look there after he’d been so enthused, which is stupid because it’s not Danny’s fault, but before he can, Steve hops to his feet.

He emerges once more from the living room with a bottle of Ibuprofen and a glass of water.

“You got me painkillers for our one month?” Danny quips.

Some of the smile returns to Steve’s face. “Would you have been happy with that?”

“I’d be happy with anything you give me.”

Steve blinks, apparently stumped and in awe of this fact.

“But yeah, I’d give you hell if you did that,” says Danny, attempting to save face. Which is also stupid, mostly because Steve can read through him anyway. “Better be something alcoholic.”

“Oh, it tops that.” Steve sounds so proud of himself that Danny accepts the glass of water and throws two of the Ibuprofen back before he has time to worry about the smug satisfaction.

“Hey, Steve?”

Steve quirks his head.

“Just…thanks.”

“You don’t even know what it is yet.”

Danny hums. “I don’t have to. I’m touched anyway.”

Touched that he cares. That he isn’t being walked out on. That this is something permanent, something uniquely theirs.

Steve’s face lights up in that young way Danny imagines he should have looked like as a kid, if life had been kinder to him. He settles down, crossing his legs as if he plans to be there for the long haul. He seems content pushing at the hammock again until Danny’s pain lessens, until he can breathe without gritting his teeth.

It’s nearing supper before Danny works up enough motivation to stand and stumble his way back inside, assisted by a pushy hand under his elbow, only to stop dead at a box on the kitchen counter. Topped with a bright red bow.

Steve snaps a photo of Danny’s dumbstruck face and doesn’t stop laughing for a long time.

(It’s a two-in-one pancake and waffle maker—shaped like Kermit the Frog.)

* * *

To say that their first month went off without a hitch wouldn’t quite be true.

Sure, Danny’s sleepwalking is all but cured, which his therapist backs up as being a psychological issue, and he’s steadily working his way out of the _malnourished_ category into _plain old skinny_ territory, no thanks to the ‘old people nutrient drinks,’ as Steve calls them. He graduates to the furthest hole on his belt. Baby steps.

But some days Danny is sure there’s no way this level of peace can possibly last.

It’s a living thing, the swaying ease of their uneventful days, and like all living things it must be at risk of dying. He half wonders if someone is going to burst into the house and declare that they’re committing a crime, being this content. That they stole from people who deserve it more.

He’ll wake in the night, heart racing, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. Steve is usually there. Even in sleep, his arms will pull Danny a little closer, as if he can feel the slight shake in Danny’s hands.

The first night they had actual beds to sleep in, Steve started upstairs in his own. As predicted—he was sheepishly opening Danny’s door within ten minutes. At least he’d had the decency to stop, to wait for permission.

“Get in here,” Danny had grumbled.

Steve was across the room before he could finish, bundling him up in tense arms. Neither one hardly budged, and Danny woke up sore from laying in one spot most of the night. This was a worthy trade off for how rested he felt. Steve looked like a gangly college student, dead to the world.

It was sweet until the ten-hour mark, after which Danny gently extricated himself to get up and have some breakfast. At the thirteen-hour mark, he tried waking Steve, with no luck. At the _sixteen-hour_ mark, Danny called Steve’s doctor in a tizzy. The doctor sounded far less concerned than he did, saying that with the chronic loss of sleep, Steve probably just felt safe enough to relax for the first time in months.

In total, Steve slept for eighteen hours straight that night, and the one after that, and then the one after that. Until little by little, he stopped looking like a corpse and worked his way back to an even eight hours a night.

That first week scared the hell out of Danny but Steve always woke up on his own. And so long as Danny was within eyesight, he woke up without incident.

Sometimes Steve sleeps upstairs. Sometimes Danny wakes with a giant octopus wrapped around him. It works. They don’t talk about it but it works.

However, the brand new habit of dozing at random times during the day is something they both share, drifting off with absolutely no warning. Usually Danny falls asleep in obvious places, like watching TV or in the hammock. The beach chair while watching Steve surf.

But sometimes it’s with his head pillowed on the kitchen counter. Or halfway up the stairs with a basket of laundry and he gets tired, sitting down, only to wake up an hour later with clothing imprints on his cheek.

Once he found Steve sprawled on the floor of his room, laptop on his knees, snoring away. Another time it was sitting in his own _car_ after a milk run and Danny had to wake him up before he got heat stroke.

Their body’s eccentric sleeping habits usually heighten after one of them has had a day of therapy or nightmares. Danny had no idea how _exhausted_ they both were. How their reserves were running on empty for potentially years up until now.

Danny thought he would get bored of this lifestyle, itching to return to police work. In the end, however, getting up and making them breakfast turns out to be more than sufficient purpose for the day.

He’s clad in a too-large sweater one morning, hands hidden in the sleeves and chin on his arms while he watches their French toast start to cook in the pan. Steve passes by in that uncoordinated, sleepy way he does sometimes. His hand brushes over Danny’s hair. Danny closes his eyes and hums. Steve laughs a little at the sound, backtracking to rub at his shoulders and the folds of his sweater this time. Danny almost falls asleep right there, so Steve switches the burner off and waves the toast under his nose.

“‘M comin’, you menace,” he insists. Steve just tweaks his ear.

Today, he’s sitting in an honest-to-God lawn chair on the driveway, feet propped on their trash cans. A beer is nursed in his other hand while he watches Steve mess with the longboard. It’s ridiculous, quite frankly, that his life has come so far he finds the sight of Steve learning to do a kick flip at three in the afternoon entertaining. Maybe _he_ needs a hobby. 

“You’re really not going to try it?”

Danny smirks and takes another swig.

“Unbelievable,” Steve mutters. “Are you just going to sit there and watch me trip?”

“Yup.”

“We’re getting too LA, longboarding in the driveway.”

Danny gestures grandly with his arms. “Slice of heaven, babe.”

This is apparently the cue Steve has been waiting for. He rockets onto the board towards Danny, who recoils only to realize Steve planned this with surgical precision. He snatches the beer out of Danny’s outstretched hand.

Danny squawks. “Thief!”

Steve’s laughter echoes off the houses farther down on either side, the trees, the horse hoof pounding of Danny’s heart. Steve sounds like sunbeams, like ocean spray and possibility. There’s life in it. The kind of life that’s pure and undefiled.

“Hello!”

Steve stops his whirling victory lap, circling Danny’s chair, at the new voice. They both look around before finding the source as a woman walking up their driveway. She’s in a purple sundress, carrying a wrapped loaf of what looks to be homemade brown bread.

“Hey.” Danny stands. “Nice day out.”

She smiles. “It sure is. I’m just so glad someone has finally moved into this lonely house.” Then she holds out her hand. “Isabelle Chambers, your neighbour across the road.”

Steve brightens. “Commander Steve McGarrett.”

Danny casts him a wry look and Steve cants his head. “ _Retired_ Commander, actually. This lug was and still is my partner in crime, Detective Danny Williams.”

“A pleasure,” says Isabelle, shaking Danny’s hand too. She doesn’t look one bit overwhelmed by their titles or the way Steve towers over her shorter frame. “I thought this was going to be turned into a resort?”

It’s not quite flat enough to be a rhetorical question and Danny understands her confusion: two men goofing off in the driveway of a large house on a weekday, young enough that you wouldn’t immediately assume _retired_ , are a bizarre sight on a good day. Steve flips the board up with his foot and leans on it while meeting Danny’s eyes, searching for how to answer. The gesture in itself is poignant, the way Steve doesn’t want to do anything they both might not be comfortable with.

Danny catches himself shrugging, so he straightens his shoulders instead. “We run a halfway house for people who’ve seen combat.”

This is the complete truth—it’s on their house insurance policy and everything. Just that, well… _they’re_ the only traumatized people currently living here. Customers of their own brand, so to speak.

Isabelle gasps, beaming, and hands the bread to Steve, apparently deciding he’s the take charge one here. She’s correct. “What an amazing idea! I’m thrilled to see the house be used for something so important. If you ever need anything, I’m just a hop-skip across the road.”

Danny likes her immediately and so does Steve, evidenced by how they end up chatting with her for over twenty minutes. By the time particulars get sorted out—she’s a nutritionist, married, no kids of her own but loves cooking for everybody else’s on the block—they’ve already set up a day to come for dinner.

That little voice starts nagging at Danny again. Is he justified in being this happy? Can he really say he’s earned it?

_We’re healing. And that’s what counts._

But healing takes _time_ , and this is the one thing that makes Danny nervous. Because time means patience. And patience means trust, that the other person, the world at large, will wait for it to happen.

* * *

“In a twisted way, you watching me all the time is making me look bad. Gives a guy a bad rap, you know?”

Danny pops another Smartie in his mouth. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

Steve has one hand on his surfboard, tying the leash strap to his ankle, and the other on the arm of Danny’s beach chair for balance. Danny offers him the box, to which Steve throws back a handful in his usual fashion, the animal.

“Because you never _join_ me,” he argues.

“Who says I can’t join you in spirit?”

“Nobody surfs in spirit. That is the opposite of joining me. That’s…that’s like rating ice cream flavours without ever eating them.”

“Maybe you just keep picking activities I don’t like.”

“Danny—the whole point of retiring is to try new things. Didn’t your therapist even tell you that we should get separate hobbies?”

Danny has to concede this with a nod. “He did. Watching you is a hobby.”

Steve rolls his eyes and something fizzes through Danny’s stomach. He’ll never get tired of this, both pushing Steve’s buttons and watching him actually have fun.

“But if it makes you feel better, Charlie and I are going to laser tag on Saturday. Y’know, before he and Rachel head up to their new place in Seattle.”

“Can I come?”

“Wouldn’t have gone without you, babe.”

Danny closes his eyes, wishing he had his aviators but enjoying the sun’s rays on his skin anyway. He tips his face back to soak in more of the lazy warmth, ocean foam where it just _barely_ touches his toes.

So relaxed, he startles a little when a soft touch brushes over his side. After a moment, he recognizes Steve’s new pattern of tracing his ribs, the divot-like, negative space where he used to be more filled out. Literal emptiness borne of internal emptiness.

“M’fine, Steve.”

“Mhmm. Sure.”

“I can feel you worrying. LA seismometers can feel you worrying.”

The touch retreats, though Steve’s low hum in his chest does not.

“Love you, Danny.”

Danny opens his eyes at once. Steve is already ankle deep in the water, but he’s facing Danny, eyes warmer than the sun and serious and flecked with memories. They’ve said it to each other lots of times over the years, in many different ways. Teasing. Angry. Grieving together. Whispered through clenched teeth.

But this is the first Steve has verbalized it since they moved and somehow, that pummels Danny straight to the back of his eyes. Steve says it easily as usual, of course, yet the words are heavier this time. They are spoken into a hush, simple and uncomplicated. No hidden meanings, not masking some other emotion.

Danny nods, eyes equally weighted.

“…Love you too.”

* * *

The first time Danny sees Grace, a week after he told her about this spontaneous life choice (she’d made little breathy sounds over the phone that he couldn’t even begin to interpret) and two weeks after they moved into the new house, it’s at a hole-in-the-wall cafe just off campus.

He leans against his (also new) car while he waits for her, no Steve today since he’s off on a grocery run for their depleted stock. It’s a college part of town, he notes, more backpacks than grey hairs. All sun kissed skin and earbuds and yet _more_ skateboarders.

Before Danny can shake his head, a familiar profile appears around the corner. The flap of auburn hair is what alerts him first and he uncrosses his arms, pushing off the hood. It’s impossible, since Grace is technically an adult, but she seems even taller and older than last he saw her.

She spots him a beat later, her whole body tensing in excitement.

A splatter of something bright and jewel toned fills Danny’s chest. It’s the most abrupt sensation and it startles Danny even as it drives his feet forward. They’re only fifteen feet away but it’s too far.

Grace must have the same idea because she starts running, pushing around pedestrians with a smile that drips with more emotion than can be called just a smile. It’s the same bright yellow across Danny’s canvas, something at the core of who he is, something he’d keel over and die without.

“Danno!”

Danny jogs the last few steps and then she’s there, golden and perfect in his arms. He’s all wrong—she hasn’t changed one iota. Grace still feels like the world when he holds her like this, one hand cupped around her head just like that day at the hospital when a nurse placed her in his arms.

“I can’t believe you’re here!” she says, then says it again for good measure.

With the repeat of those breathy sounds happening in his ear, the way Grace’s hands scrabble over his back like he’ll float away if she lets go, Danny fully expects to have a tearful kid on his hands when they finally step back from the two minute hug.

But Grace scans his face and she whispers, voice ringing with shock, “Your eyes…Danno, your eyes are…”

“What, you calling your father old? Pointing out my new wrinkles?”

Grace doesn’t take the bait. Her volume climbs with wonder. “No, you look… _happy_. Like someone blew away all the cobwebs in there. I haven’t seen you actually happy in a long time.”

Danny’s the one who ends up sniffling outside a hipster cafe while Grace giggles and chatters about her classes and orders them overpriced green tea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole thing got UH...real long. But I'll have the last section up this weekend! Your comments have been so encouraging as I foray into this fandom - thank you!


	10. Epilogue (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All at once it clicks: this is what Danny’s brain is having trouble digesting. At some point their job stopped being a job and the hurts became personal, showed up right at their doorstep. Their wounds took longer to heal because they knifed deeper, nicking at the tender places of their souls and creating callouses.
> 
> And now, here in this oasis, they’re slowly turning stone to flesh.
> 
> “What happened to me wasn’t your fault,” Danny whispers, because if he talks any louder he’s not sure his voice will be steady. Even still, his tone flames with fervency. “Steve, are you hearing me—it was _not your fault_.”

‘I won’t pretend that we can control the night  
Or what kind of road we’re on,  
But right now I’m talking to you  
I’m looking into your eyes—  
Right now I’m trying to show you  
That we’re gonna be alright.’

“Forever” ~ Needtobreathe

Getting shot is a rite of passage if you’re a cop at their high-stakes level. Danny has been grazed and perforated by bullets more times than he’s comfortable admitting. This most recent shooting isn’t even that intense, injury-wise. Sure, he’ll have to strengthen some torn muscle fibers in his shoulder and his ACL has needed major rest from the hop down off the ceiling pipe, not to mention the ribs whose cracks have just recently stopped—finally—showing up on X-rays, but there’s nothing particularly gruesome about it. His surgery was short, by comparison.

So it takes Danny a long time to figure out why he’s awake at two in the morning, lying on his side and blinking at the far wall of his bedroom.

It’s a Steve night, though he’s rolled over onto his back with the day’s sweltering heat still lingering in the air. Danny listens to him breathe, savours each push of his spine into the mattress. The way his elbow knocks against Danny’s tailbone. 

He hasn’t explained the whole of this new-life situation to his family back in Jersey…because quite frankly he doesn’t know _how_. He and Steve are friends, much more than friends, but they’re not _those_ kind of friends. He and Steve know what they are, but the world might have a harder time catching up and he’s learning to accept that.

Danny doesn’t realize he’s drifting off again until a siren whines to life somewhere in the distance and he jumps. Steve murmurs in his sleep.

Suddenly hot, Danny throws off the covers. Though Steve used to be a light sleeper, he doesn’t wake when Danny’s prattling steps creep out the door.

The hardwood is chilled under his bare feet where he roams through their darkened kitchen, beach picturesque as ever through the wall of windows. He leans on the countertop for a moment, watching the palm trees sway. If he focuses just right, he can hear the ocean’s hissing roar in the windy night. Insects singing.

Another siren.

Danny’s reaction isn’t quite so severe as the first time, but he’s off the kitchen counter and lunging for the front door before he can catch himself. His heart beats, not fast, but too strident in his chest. Sweat soaks the collar of his T-shirt.

The locks are still set, untouched. No broken windows, no blood on the floor, no invasion of their space.

“Danno?”

Danny flinches. Turning, he sees Steve, whites of his tired eyes flashing, shoulders half stooped in that concerned way he does sometimes.

It’s foolish, but Danny looks down in a futile bid to avoid that look. The tops of his ears flush. He’s weirdly self conscious, mostly because he has absolutely no idea how to put into words the tangled debris inside his head. How to verbalize that it’s _because_ he’s happy that he’s scared. Scared that someone will come and seize it by force.

Peeking up reveals that Steve has made it to his side.

Steve’s fretting eyes turn surprised. “You’re awake. I thought maybe you were…”

Danny shakes his head to stop that thought. “Not sleepwalking. Just, uh…just checking the doors. Can never be too careful, right?”

He rattles the doorknob for good measure. Then the sliding deadbolt. Steve watches him turn it back and forth, giving a particularly sharp push towards the _locked_ direction. Next he checks the window locks, then the back door.

By the time Danny makes it back to home plate in the kitchen, Steve doesn’t even bother censoring his worry. He’s followed at a slight distance for this security check circuit. A hovering presence yet still far enough to grant Danny space.

Steve’s words come out like an Irish air, all melodic breath and rasp. “Danny…you know we’re safe here, right?”

“Oh yeah,” says Danny quickly. “Of course we are, obviously.”

“Because I’d shoot anyone who came in here, who even dared to get within arm’s reach of you.”

Danny nods. He knows Steve kept his Navy-issued service weapon when he retired and brought it with them, he just has absolutely no idea where Steve keeps it. Impressive—since Danny is usually the one who cleans and he’s still never managed to find it.

Steve’s face retreats a little, expression blanking while he thinks. Then he points to their toaster oven. “There’s a tac knife taped to the back of that.”

It’s totally left field at first, and Danny shakes his head like he’s got water in his ears. A tac knife? He squints at Steve. Where is he going with this?

Steve must see that Danny’s more alert, at least in confusion, because he straightens and points to the couch next. “And there’s a Beretta under the middle cushion.”

“Steve—”

But that man-on-a-mission glint has overtaken Steve’s face, especially when his hand encircles Danny’s bicep to drag him towards the bathroom. His shorter legs fumble and Steve automatically slows his pace to accommodate.

“You Neanderthal, what on earth are you—”

Steve crouches down, still holding onto Danny, which forces him to squat too. Opening the cupboard under the sink, Danny sees nothing at first, just their cleaning products and some shaving cream. But then Steve pushes aside a strange bottle of stain remover that Danny doesn’t remember buying—and it reveals a _grenade_ hidden behind the pipe, taped to the side wall.

Danny loses his breath, audibly whirring it out.

There’s no way Steve got that through airport security. Which means his ‘grocery run’ last week was probably a ruse to meet some underworld contacts and buy all this stuff. This is why he didn’t come with Danny to see Grace, the sneaky bastard.

Steve watches Danny’s reaction carefully, that unblinking scrutiny he used to hate and is now secretly reassured by. With the hand not held captive by Steve, Danny runs a hand down his face and swears. Betraying him is the speed with which body instantly uncoils and the shake in his limbs fades after a few seconds.

“There’s a weapon hidden in almost every room of this house,” says Steve, ever so soft in a way that feels like ice on a bruise, numbing the pain.

“Is this supposed to be a touching gesture? Going all secretly Rambo on me?” Danny can’t help but snap. He’s absolutely, down to his bones shocked that he hasn’t spotted any of these before now. He re-organized this bathroom _yesterday_.

Steve shrugs. “It makes me feel better. I hate to break it to you, but after you came to stay at my place, back in Hawaii, I did the exact same thing.”

“Of course you did.” Danny tries to snap again, he really does, but this time the words are a sigh, all affection. He wonders if there will be any knives for Junior or Tani to find, unpleasant surprises that Steve forgot to take down. “Normal people, when they want to show care for someone, buy them a plant or a puppy or something.”

“Do you want a puppy?”

Danny rolls his eyes. Of course Steve would jump on that. “No, Steve. That’s what I have you for.”

“Are you honestly telling me that you slept on that couch for months and never once noticed the Sig I taped behind the arm rest?”

Danny reaches across to flick the large hand still clinging to his arm. “No, no I did not.”

For some reason, this makes Steve go terribly quiet. An internal brand of quiet, like Steve is trying to sort through some static signals inside his head. Danny reacts on instinct, turning in to pat Steve’s chest with a flat palm.

The stimulus works and Steve shakes himself back to the present. His fingers ripple against the skin of Danny’s arm. “My therapist and I talked about healthy solutions for not constantly reliving…what happened. To not just be reacting to things.”

Steve swallows and Danny knows he is picturing the moment that haunts him the most, the one he dreams about in twitches and small cries until Danny gently wakes him up…the moment he found Danny lying on the floor, bleeding out. Steve looks embarrassed, turning his face away.

Rather than take the option to withdraw, Danny inches closer, until his toes are touching Steve’s. “So she suggested hiding a munitions locker worth of ammo around our house?”

“No, but she agreed that this was a better solution than sticking a tracker on your clothes every day. Compromise and all that.”

“Wait…” Danny blinks. “I thought this was to make _you_ feel more in control, like no one can manipulate you anymore.”

There’s that quiet again, so new to this tired, peaceful version of Steve that Danny is just starting to get used to. How centered he is and therefore how honest that makes him sometimes, vulnerable in a way Danny used to have to fight tooth and nail for. Gone are the days of badgering Steve until he tells him what’s wrong. Showing up at his house with excuses to get him out of his own head.

Now Steve’s emotions are just…there. They’re often hard to read, like a dead language, but he’s not veiling them behind quips or the next crisis anymore.

“No, Danny,” he says, sotto voce again. “This is about no one hurting _you_.”

Danny’s mouth shuts so fast his jaw clicks.

“I can’t always be there.” Steve’s grip writhes and Danny thumbs at his fingers until they settle. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that, but I’m trying to…trying to adjust to the reality that not everything is my fault. Things might happen to you that I have no control over.”

“That’s sweet, babe. You know I could kill a man with a single kick to his windpipe, though, right?”

Steve smiles. “Yes. But that’s not the point.”

“Kind of is.”

“No, it’s not.” Steve’s voice firms. “This isn’t about me doubting you or your ability to defend yourself, Danny. This is about me doubting the world you live in, how it might turn against us.”

Funny, since Danny’s been feeling the same way for a totally different reason.

“The more scared you are, the more it reinforces that need to have a plan in place in case I can’t be physically present. Hence all the weapons.”

“I’m not scared,” Danny blurts, like he’s five, and then immediately feels ashamed both because Steve’s baring his soul here and because they made a pact to be more honest with each other.

“Yes, you are,” says Steve, without one hint of judgement. “I say that because I’m scared too, just not of the same things as you.”

“…We’re a feedback loop for each other.”

Steve purses his lips. “She said that too.”

Danny thinks this over for a moment. He shivers a little with his body temperature’s sudden drop, after the panicky episode, so Steve grabs one of his own hoodies off the laundry pile and throws it over Danny’s shoulders. Torn and faded to high heaven, it swims around his frame but he thinks this is better than something constricting right now. His arm prickles in the absence of Steve’s tense grip.

But Steve, the tactile gummy bear that he is, has a hand on the nape of Danny’s neck almost before Danny can finish threading his arms through the sleeves. He swears when he has to roll them up a few times and feels Steve grinning.

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You think too loud.”

Steve laughs, also a soft sound. Then he gestures to the grenade, eyes a little too bright in the gloom. “This kidnapping was different, Danno. Mei didn’t take you because of a case or to make you talk, not even really revenge. No—she took you because you’re someone I care about and exploited that. Plain and simple. It…it woke me up, Danny.”

All at once it clicks: _this_ is what Danny’s brain is having trouble digesting. At some point their job stopped being a job and the hurts became personal, showed up right at their doorstep. Their wounds took longer to heal because they knifed deeper, nicking at the tender places of their souls and creating callouses.

And now, here in this oasis, they’re slowly turning stone to flesh.

“What happened to me wasn’t your fault,” Danny whispers, because if he talks any louder he’s not sure his voice will be steady. Even still, his tone flames with fervency. “Steve, are you hearing me—it was _not your fault_.”

Steve nods, but his fingers spasm where they play with feathery hairs at the base of Danny’s neck.

“It wasn’t,” Danny insists, spirit weeping for all the work they still have left to do, yet how stable life is right now. The past three weeks alone have been some of the calmest of Danny’s life. “We’re going to make it, Steve. You’ll protect me and I’ll protect you. That’s kind of how this whole together thing works.”

Steve’s eyes are open and mournful when he looks down at Danny. “I won’t let anyone repeat what happened to you, Danny.”

“That’s not your job, Steve.”

His face stiffens, as if Danny just slapped him. This is so contrary to who Steve is, Danny knows, that it will take time for him to process it.

“Controlling the outcome wasn’t your job back in Hawaii and it’s not your job now. Steve—your job is to _be here_. To be honest with me just as I promise to be honest with you. Just…just keep showing up, everyday, and you’ve been better than most people in my life.”

Like a recharging battery, Steve draws strength from the words, from Danny’s ribs pushing into his. He shuts the cupboard door and with that symbolic action, Danny at last feels safe enough to close his eyes.

* * *

_Back to present day…_

“So…the car waxing teaches him essential martial arts skills?” Steve is trying very, _very_ hard not to make a skeptical face for their sake and it’s possibly the most endearing thing Danny’s ever seen. “How does that work?”

Danny hands him the popcorn bowl. “Stop overthinking it, Mr. I-can-kill-someone-with-a-plastic-straw. This isn’t about logic. It’s about karate and overcoming your bullies.”

“ _Yeah,_ _Steve. At least it’s pretty accurate, fighting-wise_ ,” Tani chimes in, from the tablet they’ve set up on the coffee table. Watch parties are a new concept for Danny but he’s loving the synced up movie viewing experience. Once Tani and Quinn heard about Danny’s quest to give Steve an abbreviated childhood, they immediately made a list of things he had to watch or try. Next week is _E.T._ and an escape room _._ “ _Plus, you have to appreciate its subversion of the sports movie formula._ ”

“Mmm.” Danny’s head waffles. “Somewhat. It’s still pretty predictable.”

“ _That ending? Are you kidding me?_ ” Tani objects. “ _Uh-uh. Not what the audience expects._ ”

Steve huffs. “Well don’t spoil it before I’ve even gotten there.”

Tani mimes zipping her lips.

Both men have their feet up on the table, so they probably make for a funny sight on Tani’s end of the video call. She’s in the recliner, Eddie draped across her lap. He enjoys listening to Steve and Danny talk, the familiar sound of their voices causing his tail to thump. Tani’s phone is propped up against a beer bottle on the side table.

Steve elbows Danny. “Hey! I finally know where I recognize Mr. Miyagi from! Wasn’t he one of the old people in that movie _Amos_?”

Tani gapes. “ _You recognize him from a niche TV movie but somehow you’ve never watched_ Karate Kid _? What planet are you from?_ ”

Danny steals a handful of popcorn. “The planet Deprived Childhood. From which we are desperately attempting to rescue you.”

Steve pretends he’s not grinning like a loon, watching both of them more than the movie. Danny finds himself answering it with a smile of his own before, suddenly, he catches on to the nuance behind that expression.

“…You’ve already seen this movie haven’t you?”

Steve’s eyes crinkle, a dead give away.

“I can’t believe you let us think you didn’t know it! You’re the worst!”

Somehow, Steve wheedles even closer. “Will you promise not to be mad if I make you pancakes?”

Danny throws popcorn at his face. “Tough luck. Besides, I don’t trust you to make them any more than I trust our Frog pancake appliance.”

Tani sits straighter. “ _Hold up. Frog appliance? When did that happen?_ ”

“This afternoon—it’s Steve’s idea of a sense of humour.”

“ _Aahhh_.”

A spark flickers through Steve’s eyes, signalling mischief from a hundred miles away. Danny is already groaning for whatever he’s about to say.

“I heard a rumour that _Karate Kid II_ is even better than this one. There’s a movie I haven’t seen.”

A strangled cry of outrage maxes out the volume on Tani’s phone. She pelts the camera lens with popcorn. “ _Blasphemy! You take that back, McGarrett!_ ”

Steve laughs, loud and long, while Eddie barks in the background. His tail is a blur and Danny sinks deeper into the couch with a content, ten gallon sigh.

* * *

It’s one of those moments that makes no sense. One of those split-second intuitions Danny will look back on years later, one he’ll turn around in his mind to try and understand something for which there exists no logical explanation. There’s no rationalizing the feeling.

One minute his eyes are closed—dreaming about his kids—and the next they spring open.

His whole body returns to awareness in a unison gesture. Like he’s a cartoon character _boing_ -ing awake. Danny lays there for a minute or two, frowning, and wonders what woke him. He can’t blame Steve, who decided to sleep upstairs. There’s no wind, no sirens, he doesn’t need to pee, no house creaking since it’s far too new for those kind of sounds.

_Pop!_

_Cl-clink._

Danny sits bolt upright, heart caught in a caged foxtrot.

It’s nearing morning, dawn not far off, the perfect lighting to see a shadow cross the wall in the hallway if he squints. The phantom is gone in a flash but Danny scrambles out of bed anyway. He knows the way Steve rummages around for a glass of milk in the night and this isn’t the right sound combination at all.

He reaches underneath his side of the headboard, for the flashbang Steve stored there. There’s also a machete-like knife under Steve’s side but he doesn’t bother with it, preferring the element of surprise over hand-to-hand combat. After their weapons-slash-confession time last week, Steve toured Danny around the whole house and showed him where every single one of the weapons was hidden.

Except the location of his gun. Danny can’t weasel it out of him for anything. Steve claims it’s his ‘peace of mind.’

Swallowing convulsively, Danny steels himself to face an intruder. It’s LA. They were stupid to think this might never happen, especially in a quiet, waterfront neighbourhood like theirs. By the time Danny makes it out into the hallway, the patio door is already sliding shut, delicate, like someone is trying not to be heard. Danny has to hand it to them—if he wasn’t listening for unusual sounds, he might not have.

Except…except when he darts to the kitchen there’s no blood-thirsty intruder at all. He freezes in gobsmacked surprise—

A box of tea, one they most definitely do not own, sits on the island. The kettle steams faintly away on the stove, like someone helped themselves, and one of Isabelle’s biscuits is missing from the breadbox. Their sugar bowl has a wet spoon next to it and there’s a spot of milk on the counter top.

Danny’s mind whirls.

_A homeless person looking for food? A very British homeless person?_

He knows he should wake Steve, _then_ face their mysterious visitor, but as soon as Danny goes to the patio door, he deflates. A breathless, relieved smile escapes him. Setting the flashbang down on the coffee table on his way by, he too slides open the back door and gently closes it, hoping Steve will stay asleep.

His feet are bare and for once this is his preference, the cold night sand between his toes. He’s thankful for his long sleeved shirt and sweat pants, warding off the perpetual chill he feels now, until his body makes it back up to his original weight.

The figure standing between his and Steve’s Adirondacks is barely the same height as them and doesn’t move, even though Danny knows his approach has been noted.

“Detective Williams.”

Danny slides around to sit in his usual spot. “Director Lange. Going to be a spectacular sunrise, no clouds.”

“Indeed.” She finally looks away from the water, eyes owlish behind her glasses. “Not going to blind me, are you?”

Danny doesn’t bother asking how she knows about the weapons stash, mainly because Henrietta is a woman bordering on omniscient when it comes to those she cares for and finding out her methods is much scarier than simply not knowing.

“Of course not. Can’t go around flashbanging our benefactor.”

“Ha.” She winks. “Is that what I am now?”

He nods at the mug of tea in her hands, the leftover crumbs on her ascot tie. “Enough sugar? I can go in and get it. I know you like it sweet.”

Her unreadable mask cracks for a moment, a wrinkling around her eyes and forehead like Steve gets when he’s truly touched or amused. “That’s kind of you, Daniel. I’m fine.”

They go back to looking at the waves, Hetty sipping and Danny settling back in the chair. He watches the way light reflects off her glasses, the pin on her lapel, the perfectly straight line of her back.

“Thank you for these, by the way,” he says, waving a hand at Steve’s chair. “They’re…they’re the best gift we could’ve been given. You can sit, if you want.”

“Ah, a generous offer.” Her other hand passes reverently over the arm of it. “But I wouldn’t dare.”

Danny finds himself oddly moved by the ringing, electrifying sacredness in her voice. As if they and their weird, messy bond are something to be treated with the utmost care. He can see it in her face too, the hardening of her mouth contrasted against the softening in her eyes.

He almost, _almost_ asks what she’s doing here, if everything is okay. Which is a foolish thing, because Hetty works on her own timetable and Danny has a feeling she’s assessing him first, gathering data for her heart and not her brain.

So he leans back to wait, though it turns out he doesn’t have to for very long. After a minute or two, she finishes her tea and sets it down on the arm of Steve’s chair, wiping off the bottom first so it doesn’t leave a ring.

“You’ve both been here for a month to the day,” she begins, then smiles again. “And congratulations on your pancake maker.”

Danny makes a disgusted sound. “You heard about this afternoon’s little prank too? I’ll never let Steve live it down.”

Hetty clasps her hands, biting back a laugh. “It’s apropos for you two.”

“Perhaps for my deranged partner it is.” Danny circles a finger by his temple. “How he’s stayed alive this long is beyond me.”

Hetty hums behind upturned lips and rebukes him with one raised eyebrow. “I disagree. I think it’s quite obvious.”

Stoic, totally not avoiding that piercing look, Danny gazes out over the ocean.

“He’s fortunate to have so many people who care about him,” Hetty pushes. “Especially you.”

“Maybe.”

“Hmm.” There’s the caressing sound of loafers in sand and then Hetty is closer to his chair. “Mr. Williams…”

“Danny, please. My friends call me Danny.”

She inclines her head, looking pleased. “Danny. If I may be frank—you have no reason to feel unsafe in this house.”

It’s a foul ball straight to Danny’s sternum and his brain has to reset before he can breathe again. To hear her say it so bluntly, something that neither he or Steve mentioned to anyone, is enough to make him shift forward in his seat, elbows on his knees. He considers playing dumb, but one look into those eyes and Danny changes course.

“We’re…figuring it out,” he says, finally deciding what would be most honest without exposing how insecure he feels about this topic.

“Danny, do you really think I would have given you this house without some security precautions in place?”

Danny is so lost in images of their weapons stash and the possibility of an intruder that he completely misses the implications in these words at first. Then his head whips around to stare at her.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I personally _designed_ this house. And as such, especially as someone who has made many enemies over the years, I would never leave its residents without protection.”

“Hetty, we have no security console.” Danny tries to temper his incredulity. “Trust me—I’ve looked for wires. Other than my angry fists and super soldier Steve with his hoard of military grade weapons, we have no system of defense in place.”

Hetty gazes evenly at him. Her voice is quiet and so rock solid that it could break down walls. “Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Daniel, this house has the tightest home monitored security in the city, short of our federal office.”

Danny opens his mouth with full intention of asking her about trip wires and bug sized alarms and whether or not they have their own personal satellite and/or tactical team on standby…

Yet he watches a dark cloud pass through her eyes and all of it is silenced at once, a cloud swollen with the rain of tears she’s never let anyone see. Until now. Danny feels vaguely like he’s just walked into a colossal cathedral or the private rooms of the Queen, somewhere privileged and he has to tread carefully because of it. And he realizes he hasn’t asked the correct question yet, the one that made her come here before the crack of dawn and raid their kitchen.

He makes sure to have direct eye contact before speaking. “Hetty…who was supposed to live here? Who was it intended for?”

Hetty laughs softly, even though nothing about this situation or even the sound itself is funny. “That’s a very long story, I’m afraid. Suffice it to say that it was meant for an agent who left his friends behind to face an old evil on his own and got…lost…because of it.”

Ice water trickles down Danny’s spine as, all at once, he understands.

“This house deserves a second chance,” says Hetty, looking back appreciatively at it. She turns to Danny. “And so do you.”

He bows his head for a minute, then nods slowly. It takes a second to force the words out, but once they’re free he feels worlds better. “Yes. Yes, we really do.”

She pats his arm and it’s warm. Danny places his own on top, the gesture a promise just like their chairs. Before walking away, Hetty gives him a knowing look. “I’ve never seen anything like you two, that quintessence bond. Maybe if my agent had had someone like you in his corner, it might have ended differently.”

Danny hears the silent request. “I’ll take care of him, Hetty. He won’t end up the same way.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“Though I admit, I still can’t believe you aren’t charging us rent.”

“I have no need of money—this house is fully purchased.” Something flares in Hetty’s eyes, a blaze of longing and memory. She looks like a statue, haloed by the approaching sun and faintly smiling when she turns to look at Danny. “But what I do need is to see that not every story, every relationship, ends in sorrow. Keep healing, and you’ve repaid me ten times over.”

Danny doesn’t understand this fully yet, knows he can’t unless he walks a day in her burdened shoes; but he knows that look, what it means to want to see good flourish so badly you’re willing to die for it. “We will. Thank you, Hetty, for everything.”

“Oh, and I brought a present for you as well. Here’s to many more.”

Hetty points under his chair. Danny stretches down and feels cool glass under his fingers. Pulling it out, he sees that it’s a whole bottle of homemade Blue Hawaii. Little umbrella poked through the cork and everything.

The subtle joke coaxes a real smile out of Danny, one of those serene ones he finds himself experiencing more lately. He leans back and closes his eyes for a moment, full like he’s just eaten a really big meal—

In that minuscule amount of time, Hetty is somehow already gone. Vanished. Completely out of sight. Danny looks wildly around for her, seriously contemplating if she somehow developed the ability to teleport for real since he last saw her.

Danny shakes his head and, again, decides he’d rather not know. He bends to burrow Hetty’s gift in the sand, propping it up against the side of his chair.

In dipping down so low, he sees a dark shape duct taped to the underside of _Steve’s_ chair. It’s at just the right angle that he’d never have spotted it if he wasn’t craned over in such an awkward position. He reaches over and peels it off, careful to keep the safety on. It’s a pleasant feeling to realize that this is the first time in over a month he’s held a weapon, not counting the flashbang.

“Danny!”

Steve’s bare feet kick up sand when he runs down to the beach, hands braced slightly outward from his body like he’s ready to fight someone or catch Danny. Danny’s not sure which. Maybe both.

“I couldn’t sleep and then the house was deserted—only to find a flashbang on the coffee table. Don’t scare me like that!”

Danny figures one of them has to be calm here. “Sorry. You’re late to the party, Steve.”

Bee lining for Danny, Steve catches sight of the gun in his hands and stiffens, also a look Danny hasn’t seen for over a month. “What happened? You hurt?”

Danny tilts his chin towards Steve’s chair. Steve follows the motion and stills from ‘action mode’ when he sees the mug and teabag. Together, they both soak in this entire tableau, how strange a picture they must make. Steve plops down in his chair, turning the mug around while thinking.

“What’d she say?”

Danny, likewise, turns Steve’s service weapon around in his hands. Then he hands it to Steve pommel first. “I don’t think we’ll be needing this.”

“Oh?” Steve has the grace to look a little sheepish, though Danny is honestly impressed by his choice of hiding spot. It’s the one place he’d never think to look and the one place a hostile party would never think to look.

For one suspended, fully conscious, and absorbing-every-detail moment, Danny relishes the sight of them in their chairs, a rising sun crowning each wave with burnished gold. The quiet of a windless morning and Steve’s deep, even breathing.

Safe. They’re _safe_. No one’s going to steal away their peace, not without a fight.

“Steve, hey, hypothetical question—if something in the same vein as…before happens, are you going to go running off to vanquish said villain on your own? Even if that demon is an inner one?”

Something like shock blossoms over Steve. Not just his face, but his whole body, releasing the taut line of his shoulders and flexing his fingers into skeletal shapes. He stares at Danny with raised brows. Danny doesn’t budge, eyes steady and serious. The moment reminds him, suddenly, of the day they met in Steve’s garage, both of their guards up.

Steve straightens, setting the gun down. The action winds Danny again. “Let me see that.”

“What, you wanna drink it _now_? We haven’t even eaten breakfast yet.”

The grabby hands continue so Danny grumbles and retrieves the Blue Hawaii. He has to admit, it’s refreshing to see Steve’s determined face used for something so domestic. Steve pops open the cork right there, hovering the neck over Hetty’s mug.

“Oh come on!” Danny’s voice shifts upwards in complaint. “Gross. That’s unhygienic. You can’t just drink out of someone else’s cup!”

Steve considers this after tossing the teabag out, then shrugs and wipes off the rim with his sweater sleeve.

“Great, perfect. You’re saving lives over here. Well done.”

Steve ignores the snark through years of long practice and pours out a good two fingers. He hands the bottle back for Danny to drink out of. Then he holds up the mug in a toast, eyes equally serious, though his lips flicker at the edges, the opposite of Hetty’s expression.

“Danno?”

Danny indulges him, huddling close so their respective drinks tap in the space between them. “Steve?”

Steve gives in to the smile, and it’s just as determined. “I’m not going anywhere. There’s no place I’d rather be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Freaking FIN, y'all!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading every week and leaving such gracious comments. It's been such a retreat from life right now and I hope you're all staying well out there. ♥

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this sucker in five freaking days, a kind of trance, after falling asleep one night with Z. Randall Stroope’s “I Am Not Yours” playing in my head to the image of Danny sitting under a palm tree moonlight. I outlined the whole story in ten minutes flat and it became a race just to scrabble the words on paper before they all evaporated!


End file.
